


Below the Darksome Yew

by inheritedjeans



Series: Through a Glass Darkly [2]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Dragons, Druids, F/M, Gen, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Slash, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-22 23:46:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/919467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inheritedjeans/pseuds/inheritedjeans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Tyrant King Uther Pendragon would have had Emrys under his thumb until the end of his days but for one mistake: the execution of Camelot's Seer Witch. Driven mad with a lust for Pendragon blood, Emrys will not rest until Uther's dynasty is broken and Camelot forever changed, and he will use all the fury of the last living dragon to do so.</p><p>Alone and unaided, Arthur Pendragon knows he will never have the strength to stop Emrys, nor the power to slay the dragon Kilgharrah. But there's a reason the Druids speak of the glory of the prophesied Trio: It is only with the unity of Courage, Strength, and Magic that Camelot will be saved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Below the Darksome Yew

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost and as loud as I can possibly shout it: THANK YOU to dreams579. She is the most amazing beta/cheerleader/taskmaster I could have asked for. I and this fic are really indebted to you, m’dear. (Especially all the parts wherein I try to know how horses behave.) Heaps of thanks to blostma, the most patient cheerleader probably in the history of ever and definitely the most encouraging, and thanks to sschapstickk for letting me know just how much I wasn’t making sense at first. And thank you, themuppet, for making this fest the fantastic thing that it is!
> 
> The art for this fic was done by the ever lovely and massively talented Amphigoury and can be found [HERE](http://amphigoury.livejournal.com/43837.html), as well as in the fic itself. Go go go! Coo and ooh and ah!
> 
> This work has a prequel in the series, but is intended to stand alone as well. Welp, nothing for it, then. Hope you guys enjoy the read.

**PROLOGUE**

_The Legend – always said with such emphasis; the only legend to truly matter in all of Albion – still flows free among the Druid camps. It changes still, though not as much as it used to in the time of the Usurper’s Purging, and now the changes mostly bend with how long the years will stretch before the Legend reaches its violent end._

_(“The Invaders will land on the shores and ally themselves to the Lost One; to the Druid Boy who forgets the love that binds us all together. They will come to eat at the land with a lust that spreads like rot across a festering wound.)_

_So yes, the Legend changes under the inescapable weight of Magic’s will, but what has happened will never change, and so of the past there is only one story that will ever matter._

_(“It begins with a man who was once a king who ruled with love, until fear and sorrow bent his love into hatred.”_

_“A king? I thought him the Usurper.”_

_“Not always. Once, he knelt at the feet of the Old Religion and pledged life and limb to steward the land with honour. He was not a usurper then.”)_

_Sometimes it is told with a bitter edge, an edge tempered in the years of terror that have since passed, and sometimes – when spread by those young enough to unlearn their old fear – it is told with the romantic sadness born of a story’s age._

_(“The wending of the stars through the skies have has long shown us the destined path of the Witch, known to us in ages past as Morgan LeFay and in the timeless stretch of legend as the Betrayer. Always she would force a bend in the path of Camelot’s future, and always at the cost of the life she lived.”_

_“Could it have been different, then?”_

_“In so many ways, it could have been different. For her, it could even have been worse. But under the choke-hold of the Usurper, Uther Pendragon of Camelot’s bloody years, and held back by her own love for the King’s Sorcerer, she forced a twist that brought us all out from under the dark shadow of a long destruction.”)_

_Of Emrys, though. Of Emrys they only ever speak with reverence, in the soft voices of wonder and childlike idolatry._

_(“But didn’t he – I thought he – Granddad says Emrys killed my father.”_

_“Oh, Bran. He was Uther’s bloodied bastard sword for so long, but at the same time, Emrys was always ours.”_

_“Then if he was always ours, then why did he kill us close to dead?”_

_“Because for a long time, the part of him that belongs to us was hidden deep under his own fear – of the Usurper who broke him; of himself; of what would happen if he failed the Crown. It was the Witch who kept the spark of our Emrys glowing bright with goodness, and it was the Witch who sacrificed herself that Emrys might bring an end to the Usurper’s reign for her sake.”)_

_But the story of the Seer Witch and her Warlock, of her death and his destruction, is not what the Druids love most about their Legend. No, it is only once completed – a story of the Trio; of Courage and Strength as well as Magic – that the words begin to resonate through them until it sets into their bones, a part of them forever._

_(“But if he hated Camelot so much, how did the Once and Future King and the one they call Strength ever stop him from burning it all to the ground?”_

_“It was never Camelot that Emrys hated, Bran. Just her king and – so he convinced himself – the king’s son. As for the rest... come here, come sit, and let me tell you a story.”)_

**1**

Smoke billows from the distant peaks of Camelot that poke just above the horizon, black and heavy and thick enough to pull dark shadows over the stonework. Too long – he has taken too long to return. Steam curls up from the flank of his horse and when Arthur soothes him with a few murmured words and calming strokes down his greasy coat, his hand comes away covered in foamy sweat.

“Come,” Arthur says. “Emrys has two days on us already. I won’t let him have another.”

Beside Arthur, Sir Pellinore shifts atop his horse, face unwrinkled and bleak; pale and hopeless.

“We cannot get much further before the sun sets, sire,” he says, eyes dropping to Arthur’s horse, which froths a thick sweat at the neck and breathes heavy.

“We’re not half a league from a messenger’s stable,” Arthur says. “It’s doubtful they will have many, but if we can take one or two fresh horses, at least some of us will be able to make Camelot before the night is too long.”

But Camelot has burned already; might be dying, even now, and Arthur could be set out to find nothing more than a ruined mass that was once his home. Emrys holds all the power of the old magics in his fist, after all. That had been his father’s pride, that such power knelt before Camelot’s throne – before the Pendragon line – and pledged allegiance for all time. A dark edge in Arthur’s mind thinks, _and this is what my father has done; this is the madness he has fostered in his favourite slave_ , as he looks through the orange haze of smoke and twilight to Camelot’s towers, black and lit with a deep red glow.

“So this is Emrys’ doing?” Owain’s voice is hesitant.

“I’m sure of it,” Arthur says.

“But he was the king’s,” Owain says. “Absolutely, he belonged to the king. Since he came to court when he was a boy, Emrys has been the king’s most loyal – “

“Slave,” Arthur cuts in. “He is – was – a slave. That’s a strained loyalty at best.” Arthur swallows, wincing at the dry cling of his tongue to the back of his throat. He leans over, scrabbling at the buckles of his saddlebag. The metal clasps burn cold against his fingers, but the water in the skin had warmed horribly in the heat his horse has been throwing off. “And he didn’t arrive as a boy. My father stole him from his home as a babe, not but a year old. _That’s_ where his loyalty came from. Habit.”

“And we all know habit can be rewritten,” Pellinore says, and despite themselves, the knights all laugh. Even Arthur allows himself a smile, remembering the weeks he had spent with Pellinore on the field, hacking at his exposed ribs with the dull practice blades until Pellinore learned the dangers of exaggeration.

“Yes, well, for a while there I wasn’t too sure about yours, Pellinore,” Arthur says. “How long did it take for me to beat your over-reaching out of you?”

“Not too sure, milord. Long enough that I still carry the bruises deep in my bones.”

Arthur smiles, but lets the moment pass. He can’t think of anything more to say, anything to stretch this fought-for bit of peaceful levity out, even just a little bit longer. The sun throws spears of twilight across the hills. In another hour, it’ll slip below the lip of the horizon, and after that, dark will follow swiftly. Arthur rubs at his eyes and tries to press his headache aside.

“Come then,” he says. “We shall have to lead the horses for a while.”

They walk, Prince Arthur – whose aching heart tells him he is now king, though he didn’t think his heart would hurt as much as it does when it happened – and his knights, horses champing along beside them.

There is an extra horse that walks beside them, with no rider to guide her along. A fine blooded palfrey with a rich brown coat, now ground in with grit and sweat and exhaustion. There is this extra horse that was left to Arthur’s men, abandoned by her rider; by Emrys, who had vanished in a flap of wind and fury. This extra horse that balks when they try to strap her with a bridle and that throws her head when they try to slip a rope around her neck, though still she follows them in the shadow by the side of the road simply because they are headed to the same place and the same person. She is just on the far side of wild, though when she had been gifted to King Uther’s favourite pet, she had been tamed and broken in by the royal stablemaster himself.

Arthur’s knights eye the horse with unease.

Sir Lamorak tightens his grip on his horse’s reins and turns to Arthur; says, “What... sire, what has happened?”

Somehow, Arthur is often considered the one among them who might actually understand Emrys, Camelot’s pet sorcerer and King Uther’s favourite weapon in his war against all magic. Somehow, Arthur had begun to think himself that he understood Emrys almost as much as the Seer Witch did.

But here, on the road back to Camelot without the dragon egg they were sent to look for, seeing the citadel burn before their eyes and knowing it was Emrys who made it happen, Arthur feels like he never knew Emrys at all. Like as soon as Emrys shuddered and screamed, throwing out a hand to knock Arthur and the knights from their horses – but not killing them, and that has to count for something, that he couldn’t kill those that thought him an ally – and ripping open a hole in the air that lead to Camelot, Arthur was shown just how much he never _got_ the knife edge that Emrys had walked for so long.

“He snapped,” Arthur says, and if he weren’t now king in all but official decree, his next words would be treason. “He snapped, because that’s what caged things do. King or not, you can only push a person so far. He snapped.”

Arthur’s fist tightens around his horse’s reins and his jaw aches from clenching.

“We must reach Camelot. She’s burning, and we will not risk another wasted night.” Arthur’s voice pales but it carries far enough. “For the love of Camelot, we must get there, and we must get there soon.”

Not one of them wonders aloud what good they can do once they do get there. But they all do wonder, silently.

\--

He is cold and he is wet when they find him. Rain patters softly from the tops of the trees and green light filters down to rest on his face. Smoke clings to his clothes and nothing he has done has washed it off, though he isn’t sure he will ever want to wash it off. It is the smell of her, his witch, and it is the smell of the destruction he wrought in her name.

Camelot burns against the sky behind him. Great spires shoot into the sky like giant candles, shedding stone and mortar and blood like wax, and steaming in the rain. Smoke and steam lie upon Camelot in a horrible shroud, and Emrys thinks _this is enough_ even though it is not, can never be enough.

Emrys clutches his satchel closer to him and shivers; curls tighter and rubs a shaking palm against the soft leather, feeling the jagged bumps where the Witch’s bones jut. Her ash had mingled too much with the ash of the pyre’s wood but her charred bones he had salvaged, gathered close in his arms before placing them (gently, softly) in a warm leather bag.

Uther’s outraged screaming rings in his ears. The remembered crack of Uther’s throat under his shaking hands comforts him; the quiet in the castle, as he sent it into a long sleep, highlighting each sound Uther made in the great hall. The rip of the thin tablecloth as Uther’s fingers tightened around it in a death grip; the scrabble of Uther’s nails against the expensive wood of the high table.

Berries stain Emrys’ fingers a deep and dark purple.

Emrys smiles a shivery smile, as April’s wet chill sucks his warmth away. The underbrush around him rustles softly, the sound muffled by the weight of the rain and then gives way for a young doe; a wiry wolf flanked by yipping pups; and a white hare. They lie down along his side, throwing off heat and pressing solemn noses to his neck, his feet, and laying their heads over his hand where it lies upon his satchel.

“Thank you,” he says. The shrieks of a dozen wheeling hawks strangle his words, so he presses them out into their minds. _Thank you, thank you._

Shadow falls over him as birds alight on boughs too weak to hold them all, the weight of dozens of hawks and falcons and silent sparrows bending young spring branches until they trip against the forest floor.

That is how they find him, warmed by predator and prey, guarded by vigilant hawks and curiously still pigeons.

“Emrys,” they say, and he can feel the tears in their wavering voices. “Emrys, you have come, you have come for us.”

“No,” he says, face still pressed into the leather satchel. A bruise already blooms on his cheekbone from the hard press of his witch’s crumbling femur. “No, but I _have_ come to burn your enemy into the ground.”

Something within the druids balks at the anger burning in his eyes – destruction’s child still, but orphaned from creation.

“And the king?” they ask, the druids who still see a golden age in the stars. “What of the Once and Future King?”

The wolves that huddle along Emrys’ side lift their lips in silent snarls.

“I will spread him so thin upon his newly-defiled courtyard that they will not be able to scrape together even enough to fill an urn for his burial.”

Emrys – their Emrys, his soul shattered deep and scattered wide – smiles with a mouth lined in ash and soil. The doe leaning into his side lifts her lip and a shadow of blood drips from her teeth.

“The Pendragon line is a dead thing still walking,” he continues. “It burned to ashes the minute they set her pyre alight. I am only putting it to rest.”

(And this, this was never seen in the stars; never a part of the legend that kept them hoping through the long years of the purge. In the years they spent trying fruitlessly to hide from the Seer Witch and running from Emrys as he hunted them. They had dreamt of Emrys breaking away from the Tyrant King’s greedy hold, but this?

Ceridwen turns to Idwal and knows from the smile on his face that he at least does not find this promise as unsettling as she.)

Emrys’ fingers, skin beneath the dark crush of berries gone yellowed and bloodless in the cold, spasm and curl until they hold to the leather so tight they shake with the effort. Vines slither up from the ground, spiny and hideously gnarled, to curl over his shoulder and hug around his arms.

But perhaps...

A small, pale flower unfurls by his cheek; Emrys smiles, briefly, absently, and beckons it closer to twine around the bronze clasp of his cloak.

The gold in his eyes flickers out, fades as he nods his head and slips his eyes shut. The druids take this as permission and hurry to his side, the ranks of the wild parting for them, though not bowing their heads as they had for him.

“Come, Aida, Bran, gather his things. Mordred, send word back to the camp – we have Emrys and we’re taking him home.”

“Not home,” Emrys whispers, hanging on to the edge of the waking world even as his dreams seek to steal him away. “I’m not going to find her there.”

“No,” Bran says, young and eager, and yet somehow wise for it. “But you will find a home without her.”

The young Pendragon is still out there, after all, and their destinies are bound together in the stars themselves. Emrys will find his home again, Bran thinks. He must.

He must.

Emrys clutches his satchel even in his sleep. They bear him silently back to their skittering camp, flanked by the wild on all sides and in the sky as well. His arm that isn’t clutching at his leather bag falls to hang awkwardly to the side, sliding against the underbrush as they walk. In the wake of his passing fingers, dozens of hanging flowers spring.

None of them notice the dragon that swoops through the sky, so far away that he looks no bigger than an eagle, but Kilgharrah watches them, tracks them, waits for Emrys to call him in again. And even though the young warlock Emrys has yet to find his Dragonvoice, Kilgharrah would follow Emrys to his last request. Fire and bloodshed, fueled by a lust for vengeance – what Kilgharrah craves and what Emrys offers to him freely.

\--

Silence darkens the courtyard by the time Arthur and Owain clatter under the raised portcullis. An eerie matte red paints the stonework, stealing the moonlight from the air and sucking it all to dark dark black. Arthur pats at the flank of his borrowed rouncey – a beast clearly untrained for warfare and unused to bloodshed – as it shies and nickers beneath him. They had parted at the messenger’s stable, Arthur and Owain with the rest of the knights. Only two horses were kept there, fresh enough to bear them swift to Camelot. Pellinore had looked like he wished to protest Arthur reaching Camelot first, but Arthur knew – somehow, a feeling tight and strong in his gut – that the worst of it was over, anyway.

The castle courtyard closes in around them like a tomb, the cloy of death a heavy pallor. Quiet, so very quiet.

“Sire.” Owain’s voice, though quiet, shatters the stillness. “Sire, it is far too calm. Why would it be so calm?”

“Perhaps there are none left to make noise,” Arthur says.

The blood on the ground spreads out thin from the necks of a dozen headless guards, as it runs together and funnels towards the courtyard’s centre, where the remains of an executioner’s pyre still smokes, warm at its burnt heart. The pyre would have been massive for so much ash and ember to remain.

Arthur dismounts hastily and his horse skitters away, nostrils flared and eyes wide with nervous fear. It backs into the open gateway and huddles against the wall; tosses its head and turns to run through to the lower town. Arthur stares after it a moment, closes his eyes and breathes through his mouth (the tang of iron thick against the back of his throat, smoke tickling him into a cough), before he turns back to the courtyard.

“Owain. Were there any sorcerers locked in the holding cells before we left? Scheduled for execution two, maybe three days after we had left?”

Owain frowns. The wind ruffles his curls, scraping greasy fingers through his hair. Rot weighs down the air, sinks heavily into their skin and sits uncomfortably in their lungs.

“No, milord. But perhaps – ”

Arthur is already moving, thick heels of his riding boots clicking as they lift away from the tack of drying blood. There is a glint in the embers that stands out in the grey of the ash and the dull red glow of the wood that burns still. He bends close to the ash, smelling burnt hair and the sharp bitter of shattered magic that leeches slowly through the air, sliding against his skin like mercury. A necklace adorned with the Pendragon crest tangles in his fingers as he drags them through silty ash.

The Pendragon crest. A pretty mark for a treasured slave. The Seer Witch had worn it tight against her throat for all the years she had lived in Camelot.

Arthur’s head snaps back up. The necklace dangles from his fingers, shining in the dim moonlight. Owain grimaces, and they both begin to understand. All of the court had known, after all, the way the sorcerer Emrys and the Witch had curled so tightly ‘round each other, twining their power with what Uther called their animal lust.

Arthur scowls. “How mad must my father be,” he starts, loud and angry and brash, before cutting himself off, eyes widening with remembrance. “Have been,” he continues, “How mad must he have been. How could he not have seen...?”

Arthur’s voice trails, swallowed by the wide emptiness of the courtyard. He is surprised by the unexpected thickening of his throat. Uther, tyrant king and father both, is dead; Arthur is sure of it. And why does it hurt this much?

“So he is dead, then?” Owain swallows. His eyes widen – Uther had pulled Camelot together with the force of his will and his steel, and had ruled for nearly three decades, but now everything has changed from under his feet. “King Uther is dead? Emrys has killed him? But how can you know?”

“He is,” Arthur says. “I just know he is,” he says, even softer. “But I don’t... how he could have let this happen? He saw, he often said himself – Emrys’ bond to the Seer Witch was tying him even more tight to Camelot, his home because it was hers. So how could he not see this happening?”

“Because they were slaves, sire.” Owain shakes his head and hesitates before saying, “And because we all thought the sorcerer was his as surely as I am yours.”

Arthur did not say, _Emrys was also as human as you have ever been._ Something that maybe once, Owain, brash and sure of himself and his own hasty judgement, might have scoffed at. But maybe he sees now, standing in the ash and blood of the courtyard, watching the Witch’s necklace sway in Arthur’s fingers. Maybe now he understands how human Emrys is.

The courtyard echoes still with misery and pain; vibrates silently in their ears and quivers down their spines. The sorcerer wrote his hurt into the bones of the castle and wove it through the air.

“He loved her,” Owain says. “That’s what you think His Majesty should have seen.”

“Of course he didn’t love her,” Arthur says, voice dark and bitter, trying to remember how many times his father had said this to him. “They were no better than animals, those slaves. How could they know love?” Words his father had often said when anyone had pointed out to him the bond reeling the Seer Witch and Emrys tight together; words that echoed just how blind his father had been.

Owain tilts his head towards Arthur, a wry look in his eyes. “Yes, exactly that, my Lord. And here’s the proof right here.” A sigh, and that’s that.

They both fall silent as they climb up the steps into the castle itself. Shadows sprawl from underneath the great stone arches and Arthur feels for the first time like the castle is looming over him, unsteady on its feet and falling to swallow him whole. Arthur pauses just before the threshold and looks up. The towers glow a dull red where fire, now flickered into nothing, had warmed them.

Sir Owain slides his sword from his scabbard and nods when Arthur tilts his head in question.

The silence of the castle chills the smoky air and the only sound is the clack of their boots through the corridor. Empty. Arthur is too late, couldn’t ride back fast enough, in his chase after the sorcerer who had ripped a hole in the air and jumped through to Camelot. Some small part of Arthur hurts that he had been wrong, before, when he had looked at Emrys (tall and proud, eyes sharp and smiling at the bird he was feeding at his shoulder) and thought _Father is wrong. He_ has _to be wrong._

The corridors are empty. Torchlight flickers long down the corridor, sweeping through small alcoves and catching in ragged hanging tapestries, some smoldering and others burnt to ghostly skeletons, crumbling at the slightest errant breeze. The stone wall is warm to Arthur’s touch but cooling. His hand comes away gritty with soot.

“He burned them,” Owain says.

Arthur says nothing. The first door he pushes at, worn wood fibres shedding into his palm, opens with an easy creak. A small storage room, littered with linens and people who sprawl indelicately over them.

“Are they...” Arthur cuts himself off, rushing to pat clumsily at the nearest cheek. They carry the flush of life in their skin, so he hopes, he hopes that perhaps Emrys still kept with him in his madness a shred of the compassion Arthur knew – he _knew_ – that he saw, as Emrys flamed the gold in his eyes and summoned apples, rich and red, to offer to a starving child they were passing on the road.

“I have a heartbeat,” Arthur calls out, voice too loud in the silence. The heartbeat is strong, as is the breath warm against the back of his hand.

“I as well, sire.”

Arthur frowns. “They’re sleeping.” He pats the woman’s cheek and jostles her shoulder, but she sleeps on, breath gusting quiet from her mouth, and heavy.

“But comfortable enough, milord. Shall we continue?”

They work quietly through the castle, passing through pockets of misting cold and gaps of searing heat, where mortar spills from the masonry, lit by the fire of what Arthur knows must be magic. Through each room they pass, the floors are spread heavily with people whose hearts beat with steady pulses, asleep and impossible to awaken, though they try. Asleep, not dead. Every servant, lord, or lady they pass lies asleep when they could just as easily lie dead.

And what does that say about Emrys? Is it a contradiction, the result of pure chance that the spell Emrys wove didn’t slay anyone at all, or is this proof of the depth of his honour?

The air chills in front of the entrance to the Great Hall. Arthur’s fingers catch against the door, clumsy for the stiffness in his cold bones. Ice cracks from the hinges as the door shudders in its frame, swings to bang against the wall.

“Father,” Arthur cries. Uther’s corpse – skin waxy yellow in his face, prickling with purple-pooled blood along the bottom of his hands and neck where they rest, yes, he is dead, he is dead – sprawls over the high table, arms spread wide, mouth overflowing with cheeses and breads and fruits so rare as to be a treat even for the Crown Prince (but never for his father).

Arthur trips against his own leg as he stumbles almost blindly across the threshold into the hall. Owain’s, “Arthur, wait...” is snapped short by the ringing of a bell, clear as it ever is before the morning’s watch begins, shattering through their ears, shaking the ground beneath them.

His father’s skin is so cold, limbs stiff with death as Arthur pulls at him, lays him out on the floor, folding his hands together and scrabbling at the food in his father’s mouth with shaking hands.

It isn’t until Sir Leon (a distant part of Arthur thinking, _Thank the gods, he is well, he is safe and alive_ ) stills him by holding him by the wrists that he realises that the people have awoken.

Arthur looks up through blurred eyes. Leon holds himself stiffly, not looking at the king, mouth in a tight line. He pulls up an edge of his Camelot-red cloak (the colour Arthur once thought he himself would look so fine in, but he never had learned how to wear it like Leon) and wipes Arthur’s fingers through it, rubbing off the cheese and fruit and spit and ash.

“Leon.” Arthur’s voice scrapes through the air on brittle wings. “My father. See to the king.”

“Of course, sire. Of course, Arthur.”

Leon kneels beside Arthur and gently wipes Uther’s face clean; closes his grotesquely gaping mouth and though he tries to close Uther’s bloodshot eyes, they keep sliding back open.

Buzzing thickens in the hall but the people dare not approach Arthur where he sits, hands clasped atop his father’s.

“Arthur,” Leon says, voice hushed but pointed, almost lost in the din of panic filling the hall. “Sire. He must have fled. Emrys. We need to prepare, and the people need a king who can save them from the mad sorcerer. You need to be crowned and we need to do it now.”

“Yes, of course,” Arthur says, voice so very far away. “But first we will carry my father to his bier.”

\--

Arthur once spent the hours in which he was confined to dusty rooms with doddering tutors imagining this moment. How he would stride confidently – how he would know he was kind and just, the rightful king of his adoring citizens – between two columns of proud knights, their red capes rippling with the force of their cheering, decorum forgotten for the sake of excitement. How he would kneel before the throne he was born to sit on and though his knees would be sore against the stone steps, he wouldn’t feel it, so strong would be his focus. The crown would slip onto his head as he spoke the sacred words, and he would welcome the strain on his neck from the weight of the solid gold because (and this his father’s voice said in his mind every time, exactly as he had when Arthur had toddled around on stubby legs, eagerly grabbing for the shiny crown that sparkled on his father’s head) _that is the weight of your responsibility, Arthur. Bear it with pride, honour and strength, and always with love for Camelot._

As a boy not yet tall enough to sit in his chair without dangling his legs above the ground, Arthur had dreamed of the sun and how it would stream brightly through the window, a portent of the bright future of Camelot under Arthur’s rule. All the proper stories of great men had portents and though his could never be properly foretold by the druids – for _they are_ evil _, Arthur, and they are heathen_ – the portents would still appear, and Arthur would be terribly clever and figure them out for himself.

His father had always been there in his old imaginings. Arthur had never been able to think of a future without him and had never tried, though he had known from his studies that kings died before princes could ascend. That was how it always happened in the histories. But as a child, Uther was the exception, immortal and imposing; a future without him, unfathomable.

Uther was always proud and smiling in his dream. The older Arthur grew, the more ridiculous that notion seemed but it never quite became impossible, and how he couldn’t help but love his father for that.

On the morning of Arthur’s coronation, the dawn shines bright through the windows but smoke lingers in the castle and filters it into a dull orange haze. His knights – those that still live – line the Great Hall but they are silent, mourning. His father is dead and the air smells like bone and ash and fear, and Arthur grieves for a future he had once thought possible.

The feel of the crown on his head is the same though. It pulls on his neck exactly as he had always known it would, stretching muscle and flaring tendons. Almost how his battle helm weighs on him, but not quite, and not at all. Arthur is quite unused to feeling this, the weight of a thousand years of Britton and a dozen splintered lines of dead kings, melded onto the shine of the crown’s gold.

Arthur looks at the throne that now belongs to him and sees a father (smiling, eyes shining) crowning a little boy too young to carry the weight.

**2**

It happens on the day a fleet-footed palfrey stalks through the druid camp with a high held head, straight into Emrys’s arms. He does not smile, but he leans into her neck and whispers softly against her coarse hair. The camp stills as he leads her with a word and his will.

She trails him like his second shadow and shies from any other’s touch but for Mordred – for him, she will stand still, and let him stare in her eyes and ghost his hands over her velvet nose. At the edge of every camp the druids make, every fire they light (with soft prayers to god and goddess and secret spirit alike), Mordred sits apart, warms his hands on the palfrey’s indulgent huffing breath, giggling even under the eyes of Emrys. Emrys, who watches it all with a seriousness that Ceridwen doesn’t understand, and dares not try to, instead catching herself as she stares at them from the corner of her eye.

She shivers and pulls Bran closer to her, tilting her face up to the sky, but the clouds lie heavy upon it and she cannot see a single star.

“Mother,” Bran whispers. “Can you see it?”

His voice thickens with sleep and slides into a sluggish yawn. The night stretches long, and Bran should be sleeping – he is but a child yet – but the vitality of spring leeches indulgence through the camp and she lets Bran bring his blankets from his tent to the fire. Both of them pretend he will sleep under the stars, but both of them know tomorrow will be greeted with exhaustion.

“See what, my sweet?” Her hand – cold, from want of the sun – falls heavy onto his warm brow. (Through the thin veil of smoke and warped by a haze of heat, Ceridwen sees Emrys watch Mordred with an interest newly attained; beckon him close and curl beside him as they warm their hands at the fire.) She watches the stars and she does not watch Emrys, she dares not, for he has come for them at last; they cannot drive him back to the Pendragon fold. He has come to them, and they will stand by him to patch his soul together, should he let them.

“The sign of the Trio.” Bran’s eyes slip shut and Ceridwen tucks the edge of the blanket firmly under his chin. His muscles slacken and his voice becomes lazy with sleep. “I see it; the Trio has come back at last.”

Ceridwen clucks and avoids looking across to Emrys – he who was once foretold Magic, brother of Strength and twin soul of Courage – as she says, “The Trio was shattered twenty five years ago, and the stars remember it no more. Emrys and the Once and Future King must forge a new path, and we all must hope it is for the better.”

These words she has said already what seems a thousand times, at some council or other, and she fears she will speak them another thousand or more.

“But I see it, just like Father always said it once looked. Crowned dragon, falcon, and sword of the protector.”

Clouds blacken the sky and neither stars nor even moon shines through. But if Bran has the gift...

“Either you are strong, my boy, or you’re asleep where you sit already.”

Ceridwen grunts softly as she scoops him up – he is too big for this already, eight and centuries old, but he is her last; she cannot let him grow up yet – and carries him back to their tent. When she returns to the fire, she sits next to Aneirin, and with him watches Emrys openly; watches him as he leans into Mordred, teaching him dark and angry secrets and discovering with him a power over the sacred human form.

“I hear them sometimes,” Aneirin says, voice quiet under the snapping sound of pine barely dry enough to burn. Sparks and embers crack through the air and light Aneirin’s grey eyes with sudden colour. “Emrys teaches little Mordred how to hold the fire of anger deep inside, and you know the black magics that Uther demanded his Sorcerer learn. I do not like this, Ceridwen.”

“But he is ours, Aneirin. Our Emrys at last. He’s come home to us.”

At last, after years of hunting them into the ground at the whim of the Usurper King Uther, Emrys sits beside them. Their Emrys, finally a shield before them rather than a sword at their throats.

“Has he?”

Emrys waves a hand in front of himself, and the sparks bursting from the fire gather close together into the flapping wings of a falcon. His smile is small and thin, and his eyes are eager. A gust of wind scythes through the air and whips the falcon away; when the sparks fall together again (Emrys with his arm still outstretched, face etched with a pale scowl) it is to show a rampant dragon, spearing up high into the sky, crowned with circling licks of white hot fire.

“Emrys,” Mordred whispers, voice cracked and dry like brittle bone, “it has happened. Have you felt it happen?”

Emrys nods in a shudder, and they gape together at the dragon as it circles over their heads. He reaches for his leather satchel, hands curling tight around it. Death bleeds sluggishly from it and pulls at Ceridwen’s already lowly spirit.

“Arthur Pendragon has been crowned,” Mordred continues. “The last of the Pendragon line.”

“The last of the Pendragon line.”

Winds gust around the flapping tents, and Emrys lets the dragon fall away; Ceridwen sees only campfire once more.

“You promised me, Emrys.” Mordred grabs Emrys at his shoulder. “You said you will find a way. To atone for all the years you served the Usurper like a loyal, rabid dog. To atone for how you led them to me. For how you had my whole camp killed.”

“I have, Mordred. And I will. You see? My mark already has been set on time. The future is decided.”

He leans close to Mordred and points to the wheel of fire over their heads, where the wind gusting around flapping tents has punched a spear of fire into the air. It writhes above them, shearing into the form of a falcon clutching a longsword of blue-white fire in its talons. The dragons turns, silent and loud in its colour as it sweeps massive, sparking wings and dives down, its claws of orange flame stretching out to grab at the sword. They grapple together over the hilt for a short moment before their wings curl around each other and they fall away again, breaking apart into spark and shapeless, popping ember.

“There it is. My path of war laid out for me.”

Stars beat down dull over the glade and Ceridwen shakes her head, feeling small and scared of the fire’s glow on Emrys’s grief-wan skin. Hard and bright, casting shadows over the lines of his face and limning the edge of the scarring across his lips with red.

\--

The morning after Emrys sees his future in the fire breaks over the camp calm and wet, rain falling in thin grey mists and birds chirping quiet while the skies are still clear of raptors. Emrys pulls Mordred from his sleeping just after the burn of the sun starts eating at the edge of the horizon.

“It’s time I left, Mordred.”

Mordred nods, face small and fiery. “When I was running... When Pendragon cut my family down and I was running, I saw inside your head. That you hated them, too.”

“And I hate them still,” Emrys says.

“Then you’ll kill them. You’ll kill them all.”

“I will.”

Emrys stands up and shakes out his limbs, nodding down at the little boy (who is more ancient than a little boy by far) sitting by his feet. He throws his arms wide, holds his head back, and explodes into the shape of a small falcon. Ceridwen shudders as she watches him twist through the air in lazy circles, wings clumsy and uncoordinated.

This is not right.

Mordred claps gleefully, and no, this is not right at all.

The falcon – Emrys – shrieks, and it is a call of war. The next morning, he is gone, and none but Mordred sleep any easier for it.

(Mordred does not ever join them by the fire again, but sits by himself, hand resting on the restless flank of Emrys’ palfrey – the horse that Mordred stops so often from fleeing after her master – and watches Emrys from afar, scrying in the embers of every dying fire. Mordred never looks to the sky; Bran never stops. And so they both see very different things, but Ceridwen asks after neither. Truth is, she fears both.)

The leather bag holding the Witch’s bones lies in Aneirin’s tent, in the corner yet in a place of honour; best left forgotten, but too sacred to forget. Ceridwen frets about shrines and restless spirits, but none dare to bury the Witch. Instead, they tote her around from forest clearing to cave – camp to hidden camp – much like Emrys had done, in case he should return for her. He is their Lord, first and foremost, after all. They would never deny him the honour of choosing where her bones should finally rest.

\--

Spring’s melt slicks the ground beneath Kilgharrah. He wheels through the sky, looking for a spot of dry land to rest on. The Pendragon Tyrant will be hunting him. Were it even fifteen years ago, Pendragon would be riding out to find Kilgharrah himself, but human flesh is weak and changes swiftly over the passing of even a few scant years. So the Tyrant will hide and plot out all the ways to bring Kilgharrah to heel – but Kilgharrah will not again submit, and no Dragonlord would command that of him now – and Kilgharrah will eat away at the edges of Camelot until it hemorrhages enough knights that the citadel crumbles from the chaos within its walls.

The Witch’s screams ring in his ears. She had freed him, had tamed her magic in ways forbidden to her so that she could snap his chains and bid him, _Go!_.

A flock of birds scatters before his snapping maw and the trees just beneath his wings shake under the power of his roar. He hears himself echo off the hillsides leagues away and knows there will be few brave enough to leave their wretched huts tonight.

Last night’s rain has left the greenery wet, leaves waving and throwing off sparks from the sunlight. Green, green far and wide, as Kilgharrah drives himself high into the sky, neck turned always down, searching the roads and the fields and the town squares wherever he passes them – all he ever sees is green, the blue of the sky, or the brown drab of common folk.

He waits for Camelot red, caught bright in the flapping of long capes, to bleed across the land; he waits until he can make it bleed into the soil. But not a single knight’s cape has yet swept out from the castle. Not a single one, since the boy Emrys burned Camelot black and fled to hide from his murderous king. They hide like rats in the grain, and if he must go back to burn them in their homes, in their castle built of fear and the bones of his Old Religion kin, he will.

Kilgharrah feels the crackle of magic bending from the core of Albion through her favoured conduit before he sees it – the falcon, gliding on golden wings. Cold rushes before it, billowing through the air, snapping with the spark of its magic. Kilgharrah’s scales rustle, curling in against the chill.

The Witch has taken Emrys, the tamed pet of Uther’s keeping, and made him more unpredictable than the most wild of wolves. So he wonders, he cannot help but wonder, if Emrys chases him to beg aid in a war against Camelot, or if he chases Kilgharrah to slake the bloodthirst born in him upon the Witch’s death. It was only after she had freed Kilgharrah, after all, that Uther saw the need to put her down like the animal he thought she was.

Upon Ygraine’s death, Uther slew hundreds with neither mercy nor distinction. And maybe… And maybe Emrys has learned too thoroughly at the hand of his master.

Emrys lands – audacious – on his shoulder, talons curved cruelly to hook under his scales. Kilgharrah roars, tucking his wings tight and spinning into a diving barrel roll, but Emrys does nothing more than shriek and tuck himself tightly into Kilgharrah’s side, talons locked in a rictus grip to his scales, needling into the flesh beneath until blood drips out over Emrys’s feathered legs. The ground – wet, abhorrently wet and green with spring – closes fast, so Kilgharrah snaps his wings open, the thick of the air jarring his joints, neck lashing back whip-quick from how abruptly he levels off, tail tapping the ground as he peels up above the fields and arches over a large bluff of stocky trees. Before he can spin again, trying to scrape Emrys off against the treetops, or crush him against the earth if he has to, the weight of Emrys’s mind presses against his.

_Land with me, brother, and I promise you we will tear Pendragon’s land to pieces between us._

_Land, and fall prey to your madness? I think not, young warlock._

The longer he climbs, heaving up through the sky, the more vicious the chill that leeches into his bones, sapping strength from his flagging muscles – an unnatural chill, spread like poison through the air.

_You will fare no better in the air, as well you know. Land with me. The Usurper is dead, as he should have been long ago, and together we will ensure his line stops at the Pendragon pup. No more will magic be Camelot’s slave. It is long past time our kin were broken free._

The Usurper. If he truly is dead – if Emrys has broken away from Camelot so wholly…

Kilgharrah claws through Emrys’s mind and reads truth; sees the Usurper Uther Pendragon laid out on his banquet table, berries dripping red from his mouth, throat choked tight around his own gross opulence, eyes bulged and red with blood. The memory reeks of satisfaction, and it gives Kilgharrah reason enough to trust Emrys. For now.

He lands them heavily beside a copse of trees. Mud squelches around his claws, sliding wet between his scales. Emrys flits twice in a circle above his head before he dives, stripping his magic from himself like he would pull a cape from his shoulders, snapping his wings once and then landing in a smooth crouch. He uncoils and stalks toward Kilgharrah, stopping just short of the reach of Kilgharrah’s neck.

Neither bow. Kilgharrah watches Emrys pace. He bares his teeth – long like spears, and worn into cudgels from centuries of use, brittle and shattered in places from his time spent captive – in warning. Emrys doesn’t seem to notice. His eyes are too busy roving, gold twining with blue, undergrowth pulsing with the magic spilling from him.

“You were there,” Emrys bites off. He glares, eyes filled with a desperate _wanting._ “When she – when my lady – when the king burned her. And before that. You were there, dragon.”

“Yes, young warlock.”

“Did she – why did she – how?” Beneath the rust of anger and sadness on his face, Emrys looks dimly confused.

“Your witch has ever been known by druidic legend as the foretold Betrayer. Through every path she could ever walk, she had ever the destined fate of traitor. On some, she even turned her back on you.”

Emrys twists his face up, but remembers the bitter edge that had swallowed its way down to the roots of her soul, close to the end. His brow twitches and bends his eyes into a sad stretch of blue.

“And this time? What happened while the prince and I were away?”

“She struck the chains that bound me and bid me to give her vengeance. Her soul never belonged to the Usurper as yours had.”

And his had, Emrys knows. Every spark inside him had belonged to his king, save for the coals he hid for his witch, under ash and buried deep, smouldering long and secret and strong. (Some horrified part of him feels an aching sickness in his belly and wonders if he doesn’t belong to his king still.)

“The guards caught her in my cavern,” Kilgharrah continues. “Her magic was too weak to hold them off – she was never meant to spend herself in the tangible world. Hers was the kingdom of what has and may yet be. The Usurper had her burned before rest restored her strength; I smelled the char of her flesh as I flew.”

“Stop, stop it.” The air chills, rain misting down and climbing through sodden clothing. Emrys wraps his black cloak tighter around himself and shivers where he stands, ears tipped with red and windburn racing down his cheekbones. His eyes burn and his head pounds and an ache lodges in his ears that he can’t soothe away.

“You knew this would happen, Warlock.” The dragon cannot help the pity that floods his voice. In every world that may have been, few certainties lanced through each: the Witch would betray those she pledged allegiance to, the druid boy would slay the High King on the fields of Camlann, and the warlock known by the druids as Emrys would suffer through it all alone. “The world was never meant to be this way; _you_ were never meant to serve the elder Pendragon as you did. The Witch walked in worlds that helped her to see how she could fix it, could set you back upon your most free path, and she did, even though to do so she had to drench her heart with bitter enough to overwhelm the peace you gave her.”

Silence beats between them for several long moments. Emrys hangs his head and Kilgharrah watches as his shoulders rise and fall with each deep breath he takes.

“You promised her vengeance,” Emrys says, his voice cracked deep and wide.

“And vengeance I mean to take.”

“Then you will help me. Uther built a kingdom he held more dear to himself than his own heart, and pinned it in place with a son he bought with the blood of his queen. It would only take Arthur Pendragon’s death to pull the whole kingdom to its knees.”

“I promised the Witch I would bleed Camelot until her streets ran red.”

“No, you promised her vengeance,” Emrys says, voice bursting with impatience. “And here is how we will avenge her best: We will take apart the Tyrant Uther’s kingdom and bring magic back to rule over the land. The people will bow to a new sovereign – you, born of magic and talented in the old ways – as they once did so easily when Uther’s conquest brought them together, and the entirety of his life will be broken into nothing. We can strip all meaning from his name.”

“I will have my blood, and a fledgling like you will never take it from me,” Kilgharrah growls, stretching out his neck towards Emrys and narrowing his eyes.

“Yes. You will have your Pendragon blood, and the blood of his most favoured of allies, but no more. Not if you truly wish for Dragonkind to live free again. The Pendragon whelp still hides in his castle, but he will crawl out from his lair soon to hunt for me – whatever his feelings were towards his father, and I’ve reason to think them unkind, he will never let regicide go unpunished. Not if he wishes to keep his throne. When he hunts for me, we will strike him down, and him alone.”

“The Pendragon whelp, you call him. How has he so swiftly poisoned you against him?”

Emrys twists his mouth into a small, sad frown, pulling the strange scars on his face into sharp relief. “He bears the blood of a tyrant. And I know him. Though his father is dead, his ideals still hold Arthur fast in their grip.” He looks up. “The burned her, and for that Uther must pay the highest price. I have taken his life, but he would not care overmuch for that. So I will take his kingdom and his son while he watches from the Otherworld.”

“So,” Kilgharrah rumbles. “Drawing the whelp from his castle. Do you think he would be lured away by sightings of a dragon?”

Emrys smiles and tightens his grip around his gloves in want of the leather satchel he had grown so used to holding.

\--

“Sire.” Sir Leon strides through the open doorway with his hand on his sword hilt and his head leaning forward – anxious and battle ready.

Arthur sits straighter at the council table and pulls his hand back from the map to hold onto the carved wooden arm of his chair, fingers curling painfully into the spined mouth of a dragon. Firelight flickers over the walls when the scullery maid flinches away from tending to the fireplace, her whipping skirts stirring the air. She gathers her things and pads quickly out of the chamber.

“What is it?” Arthur asks.

“A messenger’s just come from the north – there have been numerous sightings of a dragon flying over some villages north-east of here, and just north of the Forest of Ascetir, some peasant has sighted a shapeshifting sorcerer consorting with that same dragon.

“Shapeshifting?” Arthur frowns. Emrys had been capable of many things that Arthur had seen, but that had never been one of his tricks before.

Leon nods hurriedly. “The peasant saw a falcon shift into a black-cloaked man, tall and dark of hair. He then talked with the dragon for some time in a tongue the peasant couldn’t understand.”

“They speak a tongue found in the ancient east, the dragons, or so my father said.” Arthur leans back, props his right elbow on the chair arm and his chin on his upraised fist. “How long ago did the messenger say this happened?”

“Two days, Sire.”

Arthur frowns, rapping the fingers of his left hand against the table, an obnoxious _tap tap tap_ that clinks through the otherwise quiet room. The knights and advisors settled at the council table watch and wait and wait, clenching cloaks in tense fists, jaws clenched.

“Then we must leave at once. Morning slips away the longer we sit here, and if Emrys is colluding with the Great Dragon, all of Camelot is in danger.” Arthur stands, pushing his chair back with the backs of his legs. The chair scrapes across the stone floor slowly, drawing out a heavy sound. “Leon, see that twenty men are armed and ready for horsed combat – I think spears would be appropriate.”

“But sire, what of the sorcerer?” Leon stutters out. “What of… Emrys?”

Leon had been one of the few to speak with the two court sorcerers of almost inane topics; to ask Emrys what he thought of Camelot’s falconry, or the Witch whether she too thought that the honour guard held blades too ornate and heavy to serve any real function. The Witch had never said anything where Arthur could hear it, but he remembers the gleam in her eyes, the sharp interest, when she overheard Arthur discussing what manoeuvres would better fit a short sword and how to best employ the bash of a buckler to throw an opponent off balance. Maybe she had seen the knights go about their training while watching from her tower window. Probably not much else to occupy her time, while Emrys was away, Arthur muses.

Leon’s voice brings Arthur back to focus, and God, he would give up every luxury he possessed if it would buy him even another three hours of sleep a night.

“If he’s working with the Great Dragon, I don’t see how even twenty knights could work to bring them both down.”

Arthur thinks about the blaze of gold lighting Emrys’s eyes as he shattered through a dozen Druidic enchantments with a single sweep of his hand and silently agrees with Leon.

“I trained to work with Emrys from the moment he was brought out into the court. Do you think my father had no methods for bringing him to heel?” Of course, now that she was dead that was a meaningless assertion, but fear is more a poison to men than misplaced confidence. “But first, we go for Emrys’s ally – in my father’s Purge, hundreds of dragons were ripped from the land. I hardly think one more will prove a problem, do you?”

And Leon, God bless him, doesn’t voice any of the disbelief lingering in his eyes. He just nods sharply, turns on his heel, and speeds down the hall towards the barracks.

What choice does Arthur have? Better to meet Emrys and his dragon in the field than in the city, anyway. Too many live in Camelot. Too many to lose. And Arthurs fears that they would certainly be lost if he were to remain here.

\--

The forest is quiet. Their horses beat a path gently, softly, over the dirt trail, twisting around trees that lean together and sag with rot. Moss eats the sound of their footfalls and every wooden creak from a tree bending in the wind echoes long around them.

The forest is deadly quiet. Leather saddles creak as the knights shift atop their horses; chain links rustle, hushed under their heavy red cloaks.

_Something is wrong._

Arthur stirs, grimacing in his saddle, sore from hours of steady riding. Sparks snap through his head and bitter crumbles through the air, because _something is wrong._ The oily tang that coats Arthur’s tongue weighs his jaw with heavy fear; with fear and the creeping feeling of

_something is very wrong._

The sky – what can be seen of it through the scarce bald patches of forest canopy – fades fast above their heads into a pale grey that falls to licks of bloody colour along the outer rim of the horizon, seen bending between the trees at their feet. The sky is clear, empty and wide. But Arthur cannot fight the pull of _something is wrong_ that stretches his neck back and cramps his muscles into a stressed anxiety. The sky is clear, is empty and wide and clear, but

_something is wrong_

he cannot stop searching it for that trail of wrongness that stretches his skin and weighs him down with the sharp of magic.

The last village to report a sighting of the dragon lies another full day’s ride from where Arthur’s knights – her most brave, as far as such things can be judged – fan out along three north-running roads, but the wings of a dragon could make up much ground fast and Arthur doesn’t know, he can’t know, exactly where the Great Dragon and Emrys will go. They are not bound to the roads, and although Arthur has spread his knights across a swathe of land to march alongside each other, their line is not endless, and it is broken by great gaps of impassable land. A deep swamp lies between Arthur and Leon, and to the west between Arthur and Lamorak, the forest grows too wild and thick to bear any passage.

The oily press upon his skin thickens into a sliding weight of _something is wrong_ that quickens Arthur’s mind with a strange sort of fear he thought himself long rid of.

“Sire!”

Arthur turns towards Pellinore just as the noise shatters the stillness – the clatter of panicked hooves and deep grunting of a horse run down to exhaustion. Arthur’s eyes widen, and this, this is wrong. Leon rides towards them, slipping from his saddle, his face scored with burn marks and his breathing hacking wet through his mouth. His horse trembles beneath him, weighed down by heavy mud and limping on a back leg. They are both mired with muck and wet and a horrible stench rolls from them, of charred flesh and blood and swamp water.

“Ar – Arthur,” Leon struggles out, voice crackling through the spill of blood in his mouth.

“Leon! Owain, get Leon down from his horse, Pellinore, steady the beast, and – “

“Arthur, no, Arthur.” Leon fights. “The dragon, he came for us and he’ll come back, he attacked us and we weren’t – we couldn’t – and I’m – “

“Leon, it’s alright, it’s okay,” Arthur says.

“The dragon came.” Leon gasps for air and it crackles through his throat. He says and forces himself to look at Arthur, head swaying. “We couldn’t – I’m the only one left, and there… there was nothing – “

Leon’s eyes slip upwards and he falls from his saddle, one foot caught in the stirrup. Owain jumps from his horse, arm catching on the flap of his cloak as he reaches out pull Leon’s foot from the hook of his stirrup, propping him along the shaded side of a broad oak tree. Leon’s horse stutters and collapses, groaning piteously when the gash along its withers opens wide as it scrapes on the bracken on the ground.

Arthur has seen battle – he is no green squire fresh from his mother’s perfumed court – and he knows the look of a man dying; knows that the pale gaunt of Leon’s face promises despair and a funeral pyre if they don’t retreat to a physician _now_. Through the rush of adrenaline, of worry and anxious anticipation, Arthur almost doesn’t notice how

_something is very, very wrong_

before the forest erupts with noise.

The dragon flies in with thunder in his mouth and a windstorm spinning under his wings.

“To arms!” Arthur yells, but his words are pushed down, beaten down, by the thudding of the dragon’s wings. Trees bend and snap, horses shrieking as the wood splinters and spears them. “Ready spears! Geraint, Kay, bows in hand,” he screams, words ripped from his throat and scattered in the heavy _thump, thump, thump_ of the dragon-born wind.

Arthur sways in his saddle, grabbing tight to the spear lashed to his saddlebag and drawing his breath tight in his chest before righting himself, winding his reins tight in his left hand and drawing Hengroen back to bring the dragon into view.

“To me!”

His heart pounds heavy in his throat and beats a drum in his ears. Dust pulses through the air in the same steady, heady rush, chalky against his lips and an itch he dares not blink out of his eyes. To Arthur’s right, Bedivere rallies the rest of the knights into formation behind Arthur, spears tipped skyward.

A roar rips through the air, scattering the dust in the air and stripping the branches from the trees.

“Stay steady,” Arthur bellows, “and fan out behind me.”

Maw open wide, close enough that Arthur can feel himself sway in the saddle, ebbing back and forth with each sweep of the dragon’s massive wings, cupped with the heaves of air they swallow. Veined wings, fine webbing, red and shining in the sun.

“Knock arrows, aim for the wings!” But the order comes too late – already the dragon is tucking his wings in tight for a dive and –

jaws open wide (Arthur’s eyes open wider) and orange glows dim in the deep dark of that throat

– “SPEARS UP, SCATTER WIDE,” but the fire flares out too fast.

Blooms down on the field, knights jumping from their horses (cloaks caught a fire, smell thick in Arthur’s nose) and yelling, _screaming_ , and Arthur remembers the first council he ever held on his own; remembers the terror run flush through his veins when the assassin had stepped forward.

(Colour rushes wide before him, a sweep of blazing light atop the greenery, hot and hazy against Arthur’s face.)

That was the first time he saw Emrys kill a man, with palms full of fire stolen from the assassin’s hands.

(Broad swipe of the dragon’s kneading claws, ripping the spear from Arthur’s hands, pain lancing white hot across his shoulders, _screaming so loud_ as his cloak catches alight.)

The assassin’s flesh had burned so swift into acrid ash, but not so quick that there wasn’t time for the screaming, the begging, for Emrys to show a mercy he might as well have been incapable of.

(Is that Bedivere? Just behind him, saying, “Gods be good, Arthur, _Arthur_ , get _up!_ ”)

The ground settles brittle beneath his cheek, ash misting into his gaping mouth, air punched from his starved lungs – _how did he get on his back?_ – watching the scythe of the dragon’s tail through the air, whipping behind the red-gold gleaming bulge of the dragon’s bulk as it sweeps away. A roar rings dim in Arthur’s ears.

Trees wave in the darkening sunlight, leaves burnt and golden, snapping and cracking in the wind. Arthur sees his own hand stretch up into the air, batting like a child at the smoke rising in giant gulps of wind from the white hot tree tops, black curling over the blue sky.

“Arthur?!”

Someone – Bedivere? Or is that Bedivere there, writhing on the ground, arms burnt to cinders, legs trapped beneath the shuddering belly of his horse? – pulls hard on Arthur’s crumbling cloak (black and flaking under the leaden weight of someone else’s grasping fingers) and shakes him until his head lolls and he –

– snaps upright, a burst of energy flooding thick up his neck, airy through his head.

“Owain,” he says, worried at the slur edging through his voice. The melt of skin around his back cripples him into a crooked lean as he lurches to his feet, right forearm held painfully tight in Owain’s two shaking hands.

“I think it’s coming back, Arthur. I think – “

They flinch at the sound of a granite-heavy roar grating through the air. Owain coughs, a hard hack that pulls his chest painfully tight inwards, and tears stream from his eyes at the smoke suffusing through the clearing.

Arthur looks around, head swaying (falling, fading, but he _will not collapse like a maiden in a swoon_ ) and body lurching, blood trickling from the torn flesh of his shoulders. They lean together, standing on the ash of burnt forest floor. Spread before them (lain out before them, a feast upon the high table in the Great Hall, blood bursting in his bulging eyes, pale and yellowing into a corpse’s pallor) lie Arthur’s men. Bedivere, blackened and shrivelled arms and chest collapsed under the weight of Pellinore’s horse, shivering in half aborted twitches; and there, Pellinore, belly spilling out, rent with three long claw marks, and wailing high and tight through the wretched span of his throat; Geraint, lying shattered under the shade of a tree with bark made thick with ash. All of them, loud in their death.

“Arthur,” Owain says. Dazedly, Arthur turns, looking with blurring eyes at the slide of Owain’s cheekbone, tracing it back up to his eyes, pupils large with fear and dark in his pale face. He follows Owain’s eyes up to the sky, where the dragon reels around, turning for another attack.

“Sire, the others – we need to get them into the cover of the trees. They can’t – “

“Leave Bedivere,” Arthur says in his father’s voice, loud enough to carry across the mess of moaning and screaming of men made incoherent with pain. “And Pellinore.” Arthur stumbles over to Kay where he lies face down on the prickling grass, gagging at the smell of him (so like long ago, when Emrys had roasted a man in the throne room until he was dry enough to fly away in a thousand handfuls of ash) as he feels along Kay’s neck, stiff with his burning, for a pulse. Swearing when he finds none. “Get Geraint into the cover of the trees.” Probably Geraint has a broken back at least, but he may live. “And then go to Gareth.” Gareth, who bleeds fast into the pool of wet red curled around him.

Owain rushes off, but –

that _sound_ , that _thump, thump, thump_ of wings, and the itch of magic stretched along his spine, pulling him thin inside the bulk of his bones so that every motion feels like a glut of effort

– the dragon snaps Owain up by one leg and flings him deep into the forest, the sound of his terrified pain barely dampened by the distance.

“No!” Arthur rushes forward, stooping to pick up Kay’s spear, and screams, “Don’t you dare fly away again. Get _back here_ and face me!”

Dragons are things of myth for Arthur, or might as well be. And in that moment, standing amid the broken bodies of his men, his brothers and the closest to friends a prince could ever truly have, he hates his father for leaving him so blind. But behind the eyes – Arthur hefts the spear up in his hand and feels a growl snarl its way up through his throat – everything is vulnerable.

Arthur digs his back heel into the soft give of moss and brittle grass and hooks his gaze into the twist of the dragon as it pulls itself back, rolls its head around, and stares straight at Arthur, mouth opening – so wide – and Arthur remembers every lesson Leon had taught him when Arthur had still been too young to take up the full length of a spear himself. He draws back his arm and aims straight and true at one great, narrowed eye and lets loose.

Watches the dragon bat the spear down with one lazy claw.

Waits with his eyes opened wide. And it hurts, the sweep of the spined tail scraping over his burnt and bloodied back, but –

cool wet of the air sweet against his cheek

– he can’t hold back the mangled yell that rips ragged from deep in his chest when he hits the hard jut of a tree and crumples to the ground.

(And he wonders at the sudden sight of Leon – Leon, from where Owain had propped him up against the shady backside of a tree an eternity ago – who looks lost and alone.)

Arthur crawls (fingers curling through the dirt and the bloodied mud) away from Leon, because if the dragon... if it has not seen Leon yet... but the ground spins up and out and away from him, and the rippling of screams breaks the thin wisp of his thought.

 _Those are his men,_ whose voices fade out into wretched gurgles, withering until he loses the thread of their sound completely. There’s a ringing in his head, high and tight, stabbing through his ears until even the roar of the dragon fades away. Sound rushes through him in a crackle and the wider he opens his eyes, the less he can see, blackness blotching over his sight, spreading heavily.

A man standing at the edge of the tree line, across the clearing from Arthur, gapes at the sky. Arthur crawls, arms burning, the stretch pulling heavily on the fire (flickering pain, deep and burning, spreading and catching at every bend his arms make) caught inside his bones. He keeps his eyes wide, so wide the blackness can’t swallow them whole, and fixed on the wild man who shouldn’t be here – that was the _whole point_ of leaving Camelot, so that no one else would burn along with Arthur in his defeat.

Owain won’t stop screaming, Leon won’t stop moaning, and Pellinore has stopped making any noise at all.

The wild man, beard tangled and long and hair tangled where the wind has had its tidal wash smashing against it, doesn’t look down until Arthur grabs at his muddy leather boots.

“You... need to go,” Arthur says. Fighting to keep his head steady, struggling to stay strong on his elbows, though they shake and threaten to buckle.

The man looks down, eyebrows pulled tight together, looking angry and sad, the twist of his mouth shadowing his face with horrified indecision. His hands twitch upwards, and there it is – Arthur can feel it, the heavy tang against the soft roof of his mouth, thick at the back of his throat. Magic, dark and loamy, green and warm like a fire in a kitchen hearth.

“Please,” Arthur says and he doesn’t know anymore whether he’s asking for the man to leave, to run far and fast away, or if he’s begging the man for any aid he could give. Sparks snap along the edges of Arthur’s skin, skim along the smoldering burn of his chainmail and soothe at the hard shell of his burns.

His arms fold under him and his head falls to the moss of the forest floor. Everything he breathes is green (no more smoke, no more blood, no more terror – just green and wet and good) and he can’t force his head back up. Arthur listens to the _thump, thump, thump_ of the dragon’s approach and absently curls his hand around a spear shaft that isn’t there; hears a grating voice yell out louder than a dragon’s roar and feels the curl of magic through the air.

Just before he passes out, hiding from the skirt of jagged pain around his shoulders, he wonders at the roar of fury booming between the trees.

\--

Something sweet is burning just beside Arthur’s head. He rolls his head away from the smoke and gasps for air, belly heaving against the firm mattress of packed grasses underneath him. His skin pulls tight across his shoulders and down his neck – confusingly it doesn’t burn painfully, but it should. Arthur reaches back a trembling arm, aching and exhausted, and rubs at the skin along his neck. His hand comes away slimy with salve, pungent and cloying.

“I’d leave that on, if I were you.”

A gust of air blows coolness across Arthur’s wet-with-salve skin. He pushes himself up onto his elbows and struggles with his limbs until he’s sitting up straight. Arthur blinks against the sting of the thin haze of smoke feathering across his eyes and looks around. He’s in a cave, sparsely furnished with roughly carved figures – dragons and fairy sprites and other such things contraband under Uther’s reign.

“Your burns weren’t the worst I’ve seen, but it’ll save you much pain later if you let them heal fully now.”

“I don’t have time to wait for them to heal,” Arthur snaps. He rubs a hand over his face, wiping smoke-drawn tears away and pressing against the sharp pain digging in behind his forehead.

“So such is the thanks of the Pendragon King.” The wild man laughs. “I thought as much.”

A frown pulls the corners of Arthur’s lips down. “I owe you my life, that much is obvious. But what – my men, are they…?”

The man jerks his head to the side and says, “Only these two. And them, only just.”

Arthur whips his head around fast enough that nausea jumps through his throat and his head pounds angrily. There, in the corner of the cave, Arthur can make out Leon and Owain tucked under their own blood-stained cloaks, their armour shed to the side. Both could be dead but for the rising and falling of their chests, Owain’s quite steadily and Leon’s in shuddering and broken bursts.

None of Lamorak’s men left any sign of wandering the forest as Arthur, Leon, and Owain had. Not one man. Two, then – Arthur has managed to keep only two of the twenty men he had set out with safe.

“We – “Arthur’s voice breaks. He clears his throat before trying again. “We owe you our lives. You didn’t have to help us. My father, well. My father wouldn’t have thanked you.”

The man barks out a laugh, rough and unpracticed, hard from deep in his chest. “He didn’t. And I ought not have. I should have let Kilgharrah finish you all.”

Arthur swallows, tongue sticking to the dry swell of the back of his mouth. “Why didn’t you? I know… I know exactly how you did it. Stopped the dragon. And I can take an easy guess as to how I’m not screaming with pain right now, and how Owain and Leon are sleeping so peacefully. So why?”

Balinor shifts and shakes his head to himself, folding his arms over his chest and glaring at Arthur.

“Because I looked at you and I thought that you had a chance to be a better man, a better king, than your father. Likely as not, you won’t be, but he brought enough death to the land, and if that could stop with you…”

Arthur swallows around the bloom of fear in his throat. The crown he isn’t wearing falls low over his eyes and weighs down his head until he aches. And he wants to be that person that this stranger sees, wants peace for his people and safety and joy above most all else, but... Uther is Arthur’s father, and for all his life, the duty bound in bloodlines has usurped all other considerations. It’s a need, a compulsion spurred on by the itch of years of reprimands and recriminations ( _dereliction of duty,_ his father had snapped, _for when you lose sight of defending me, you are also abandoning your people._ ) and the warm wash of love whenever Arthur backed his father in the council chambers; was seen defending his law in the streets of town. It’s an irresistible need to say,

“My father brought this kingdom together with nothing more than the strength of his will.”

The man before him snorted. “And I’m sure the strength of his army didn’t help him any,” he said quietly.

The barb sticks in Arthur’s chest, even though he recognises the truth in the man’s words, so he talks louder. “He deserves your respect for the years he gave you before the Pur – before the year of my birth, if nothing more. He gave us all Camelot; brought our people together. That will always be worth something.”

“I may respect many things other men would shy from, Arthur Pendragon,” the other man says, low and deep and slow, voice gritty with the years of his solitude, “but never your father’s treachery.”

Before Arthur can snap back, can say _you never knew how much my father loved his kingdom, or how he would give anything to save her from her enemies,_ Leon coughs in the corner.

Leon coughs, and he doesn’t stop, the sound jittery as it knocks around the cave, until – he starts to gasp and cough and gasp, grunting out deep moans in between.

“I thought you – “ Arthur stands, leg nearly giving out beneath him, and throws his cloak – torn into tatters from the swipe of the dragon’s claws, smelling of smoke and burnt flesh – back onto the mattress, stumbling over to the makeshift pallet at the back of the cave. “I thought he was healed, I thought you – “

“He is too close to the veil, one foot behind it already. It is beyond my skill,” the wild man says, quiet and clipped as though he regrets that the words need saying.

Arthur’s blood chills and his head spins, because this is _Leon_ , who raised him to the sword from the time he was old enough to keep a blade level in his shaking grip. The older brother Arthur had never had, who had taught him everything that Uther never would have.

“Is there nothing to be done, then?” he asks, voice uneven, and he hears his father saying _No man is worth your tears_ , but he can’t stop them anyway.

“Not by me.”

“Please,” Arthur says. Blood trickles from Leon’s gaping mouth; soaks in a faint bloom beneath the thick padding of the wild man’s bandaging. “Please. He’s my... he is my friend.”

Dimly, he hears a strangled sigh behind him, and a broken mutter of _those are sins of the father,_ before, “Go east until you hit the first river. Follow it south for three-quarters of a day until you find them.”

Water. Leon gasps and the sound is dry (though the blood in his mouth is wet) so Arthur should find him water. His hands shake, knocking into carved baubles littering the floor as he tries to open the pack – saddlebag? Not important, not important – beside the pallet. A gnarled hand, dirty fingernails and musky with earth, pulls at Arthur’s shoulder until he stops. Stops and listens.

“Ask for the Cup of Life. Tell them that Balinor sent you. Arthur, you must remember to tell them.”

 

**3**

The day had started out calm enough, thinks Lord Aeron of Anglesey. So how did it get so strange, so very very fast?

The hunt had begun as hunts always do, with two sleepy hounds and tired gamekeeper indulging in a warm mug of spiced mead before they left. The sun was pink and low between the trees and the wood of his crossbow, cold from the night’s chill in the armoury, had warmed nicely in his arms by the time the hounds starting pointing and huffing thick through their noses. The gamekeeper – what is his name? George, or somesuch, Aeron is sure – had levelled his crossbow and Aeron had done likewise. Just beyond the thickest stand of trees, heavy with low brush, had sat a fat pheasant that ruffled his feathers contentedly. But before he had been able to get a clear shot off, a small raptor had swooped low between the branches.

Really, it was perfectly reasonable for him to have fired on the raptor. After all, they hadn’t known what it was going to do. Not natural, to be flying about so close to where the hounds were roaming, and if it didn’t fear hounds, who’s to say it wouldn’t have carried off with the pheasant? Mangled that fine feathered gloss and spoiled Aeron’s hunt?

But the reasons don’t matter anymore. For as soon as the raptor was hit – and it was with a fine shot, if Aeron did say so himself, and never mind the scolding of the gamekeeper, because Aeron didn’t believe in bad luck, and certainly not for something as silly as shooting down a bird, regardless of what type – it began spiraling to the ground, and as it did –

“Hail Mary, full of grace – ”

– it twisted and _grew_ , wings becoming arms, and (hail Mary, Mother of God) feathers shrinking into smooth skin, cloak flowing out from the clasp at his throat, smashing hard into the ground on its – his – back.

 

The hunt had begun so normally. How did it turn so strange?

George crosses himself. Aeron jolts, and follows suit. His family isn’t one of those old, ancient, and forever ones, traced back through the years to the dawn of the Isle. He isn’t accustomed to the Old (heathen) Religion of the land, fuelled by magics and moon worship and blood sacrifice, and who knew what else? And this, this is most assuredly a practitioner of the very Old Religion.

“A sorcerer, Lord bless my soul,” George says, crossing himself again. (And again, Aeron follows suit, because it’s not like you can overdo it, warding off the Evil Spirit, can you?)

“Is he...” Aeron starts, then stops. Quiets. Waits until he is sure the sorcerer isn’t stirring. “Did I kill him? Is he slain?”

George, face pale and eyes far more awake than they had been even ten minutes ago, kneels slowly and picked up a long stick.

“Careful,” Aeron hisses.

So George is. Quiet, even with his creaky bones. His hounds stays quiet as well, sitting and shivering in the lingering pre-dawn chill. Aeron rests his hand on one hound’s head; curls his fingers in its fur. They watch the gamekeeper carefully as he creeps, leaves barely rustling around him, right up to where the sorcerer lies. Aeron gives a hurried wave when George looks over, because hurry up, don’t be a coward, old boy, do it!

George does it. Holds the stick steadily and firm, and gives the sorcerer a tentative poke.

They wait, breath baited. Nothing moves.

George does it again, a little harder, rocking the body where it lays, yet still the body stays quiet.

“His pulse,” Aeron hisses. “Check his pulse, quick!”

It’s well within his right to demand, Aeron thinks. After all, he is a Lord, the son of a great, if not so well known, man, long may his father live. And George is his gamekeeper, after all. No need for such a glare. In fact, a less tolerant master would punish George sorely for his insolence.

Aeron leans forward as George places two fingers on the sorcerer’s bared throat, keeping all the while as far from the body as possible.

“He lives, milord, but your quarrel has caught him in the arm.”

“Excellent!” Aeron exclaims. The poor, scared gamekeeper looks confused, so Aeron continues. “I hear they pay handsomely for caught sorcerers in Camelot’s court, and if I bring him in – obviously a powerful sorcerer, for who ever heard of one who could change his shape at will? – I shall bring my family into the high standing it deserves. Don’t look so glum, George,” Aeron says, walking forward and thumping George on the back. “This is a good thing! Truly.”

“James, milord.”

“Hmm?”

“‘Tis James, milord. My name.”

“Of course, good man, yes. Now quick, let’s bind his hands and feet. Between us, we should manage quite well to bring him back to the keep and from there I shall take him a’horseback into town. An apothecary should have sleeping draughts enough, I dare say, and so long as we keep him under, why, the journey to Camelot shall be nothing at all, compared to the riches it shall bring us.”

As it happens, carrying a bound, unconscious, grown man a full league through uneven forest is a thing more easily planned than done. By the time they heave the sorcerer through the gates, the afternoon grows long across the grounds.

It is full dusk when Aeron rides into town, sorcerer bound and (thankfully) still asleep. He bounces with the horse, slung over like an extra saddlebag. The road spits dust in Aeron’s face, and he thinks perhaps he should have bound the sorcerer’s wound a little more tightly. Red soaks through the linen wrap, and dirt grimes its way underneath the edging. Infection can kill a man more easily than any battle wound and a dead sorcerer will bring no bounty at all; a dead sorcerer is as like a man, nothing special at all.

Aeron finds an apothecary – dusky and old, smelling of comforting oils – and wheedles the price of a flask of concentrated sleeping draught down to near his whole purse instead of all of what he brought in his saddlebags. He sits on the bed he rented in the local inn and, staring at the slumped sorcerer on the floor and listening to the raucous noise from the tavern below, thinks that maybe he might have under-thought the venture. The road to Camelot is three days long, at least, and with a sorcerer slung across the saddle?

But the reward. Not only gold, but glory. Remembrance. Honour in the court of King Uther, a weighty prize in itself.

Yes, it will be worth it, Aeron nods to himself. The sorcerer mumbles and sloppily jerks away from Aeron’s touch as he feeds the mouth of the flask between the sorcerer’s teeth. A mouthful, that’s all the shopkeeper said. Just a mouthful and he should sleep the night through.

Still, Aeron worries, and tosses and turns the night away, scared to turn his back on the enemy, yet scared that he will look over and see gold eyes staring back. Dawn finds him a tired man and the day only makes him more tired, between carrying his prisoner, and stressing over keeping him under, and juggling extra arms and legs between his hands and the reins of his horse.

It only makes sense, really, that he might forget, just once, to feed the sleeping draught to his prisoner when they are both yet two days north of Camelot.

\--

“No. No no, please, no.”

Colour blurs before his eyes, sound mushing together into a horrifying mess of clattering metal and harsh growling of, “Can’t be right, could have sworn, another hour at least,” rope burning into his wrists, burying under his skin, _no no, please no more, please I promise._

Leather pressing into his bruises, heat blazing from his ribs, his lungs, cold munching (nipping, gnawing, maggots burrowing deeper, deeper) on his fingers and the flush of his face, and _no, please no more (please) away, get_ away.

He grabs at the leather, sweat sliding his hand away until he presses his palm down hard enough, presses and pushes, world turning sideways, rightways, blurring sound and colour so loud it blinds him –

(eyes roving, searching, and what is he forgetting, something, some of who he is, lost, and who is brave enough to adventure alone to find the pieces of him, of this lost thing on the ground?)

– and he lands on the ground, gravel rough under him ( _whoosh_ goes his breath, can’t breathe in, come back, come back, please) grey, so much grey (fuzzy, rough) above his head.

“No no, please no, I promise,” he says to the leering face ( _Uther, my king, no more, I promise, please, I’ll stop, I know, I was wrong, please, my only king my_ only _king_ ) and presses his face flat to the ground (rough with little stones and dusty in his eyes) so his cheek rubs with grit.

His back aching, scraping, bruised and bloodied, he smells blood (knows that smell, scared in a cell, alone with his ears and eyes and nose and the blood that slides wet down his back) and tastes it, too.

“No no no, stop, please,” he cries, lash marks heavy on his skin, easier to turn over, to slide along his belly –

( _You snake,_ they say, they always said, they say still, _you animal._ And here he says, he always and forever says, _I know, I know, please no._ )

– and scrabble back, not fast, so slow on his bound arms, his weak-with-exhaustion arms.

The world tilts (and slides and sways – head wound, catalogues the cold part of him, the hard part that sparks with war and steel and the smell of death, the part beloved to his king; the only part of him beloved to anyone at all) and nausea lurches up his throat, climbs up to his mouth, spills out, over a fine leather boot ( _you kicked me over, you should not have, I can’t, please no I’m sorry_ ) and he coughs and he coughs and he gags.

A hand grabbing at him, cold like a brand (or is that, that’s not... not a brand, not another brand) as it slaps across his face and forces a leather tube between his teeth. He bites down and he doesn’t swallow, he spits it out and he kicks back –

(hears a scream, and an “Ow!” and a “that bloody well hurts.” Petulance, that’s new, that’s novel)

– and crawls away (they leave him alone, Uther’s men, or wait...is it...) and leans heavily against the wall of his (cell? So grey, must be his cell) and looks up to a ceiling of pale grey, dizzy and dazed and watching the haze of swirling grey twirl high above his head.

His head hurts, and the world spins away from him again.

“Oi, you!”

Emrys rolls his head to the side and marvels at what he sees – the men watching over him, arguing, fighting – over him? No, can’t be. Must be something else. Maybe a girl, they must be fighting over a girl, getting red in the face and pointing, accusing, spit flying, yes. Must be fighting over a girl. Or maybe a boy – Emrys can’t be ( _please, can’t be_ ) the only one to have noticed both, to have thoughts of either fill his cock in the secret dark of night.

“What the bloody fuck do you think you’re doing, mate?!”

“I was just, I just, he’s a criminal, I found him, in the woods on my grounds, he’s a – ”

“He’s a what, a poacher? He steal game to fill a hungry belly?”

One man (shaggy hair, flushed face that says alcohol, maybe, though he seems steady for it) pushes the other (cowering, cowardly, and the cold part of Emrys says _I could kill you, I could rend your limbs apart with such ease, I could paint your face with fear and pain,_ and he shivers in fear of himself) back against a wall.

“Get out, mate. Get back on your fancy horse, and fuck right out. Back to whatever poncey castle they tossed you out of. Get!”

The sound of drawn steel, the swish of a sword in the hands of one who knows how to use it.

Heavy thudding, a storm in his head, _my head_ , and a furnace stoked high in his skull. He flinches at the cool fingers that coax along his scalp and turn his face this way, that way.

“Hey, hey, it’s alright, mate, it’s fine. That creep’s gone, he’s gone. You’re safe.”

“Gone,” Emrys says, and his voice is thin, cracked (bruised and bleeding). “Please, no, please be gone, please.”

Shaggy hair and high flushed cheeks, crinkles in a weathered face and a voice like honeyed mead.

“Yeah, just me now. Lucky you. Hey, hey, settle down, mate, let me get those off you.” Wrists freed, flailing arms out and away, floating, flying, he was flying once, wasn’t he? Or is that a dream he can only just remember? “Are you hurt?”

He remembers, he does, to nod, because he can still taste the blood and hear the pain screaming in his arm.

“Whoa, yeah, you sure are.”

The man – guard? Can’t be a guard, too kind, eyes too soft, smile too wide – lifts at the cloak wrapping him and turns his arm this way and that; pokes and prods at the loosened winding of bandages until they too fall in a fluttery fade to the ground.

“Looks infected. Which explains all the – woozy weaving, and whatnot. You’ve caught yourself a nasty fever.” The man looks up from the arm (his arm, _it’s his own arm_ ) and smiles honest; smiles wide. “I can help you with the infection. Travelled with the druids, once upon a time.” The man speaks through a grunt as he heaves Emrys up (flying again) into his arms and starts walking (lurching, listing) down the road (so not in a cell, so not in the castle, but where is Uther – _you killed him_ says his voice, cold like death; still and dry like death, _or don’t you remember?_ )

“They needed the help, and the protective steel, though they still won’t admit it – ballsy bandits really go for those fancy talismans they craft, you know? – and in return they helped me, too. Wouldn’t shut up about the stars, though. Kept going on and on about how strong I was, which,” and here the man interrupts himself with a barked laugh, “wasn’t all that true, at the time. Not all that true now, come to think of it.”

Wooden walls around him, smell of oak, taste of rough but carefully washed linen, sound of quiet books and loneliness; the solitude of someone who knows everyone and loves no one (and is loved by none in return).

Emrys lets the man – the quiet man, though he talks as ceaselessly as the wind does – undress him on the bed, bare his wound to the light, and wash his arm and the grimy skin of his body with a soft cloth and warm water from a large copper basin. And every time he feels his limbs twist and turn in that man’s grasp, he reaches (strains and struggles) for something – what is it? – that he can’t find, that maybe isn’t and never was there. A hidden place of fantasy where he held power and drew it tight inside himself, safe and deep and silent. But there is no place inside him; no fire burning low or steady. He lists beside himself and sighs, and relaxes into the sweeping spin of haze. Emrys falls inside himself and tries to pull the wandering threads of his mind tight, but they slip away, slip and slide away. He sweats and he struggles, quiet.

“I’m Gwaine, by the way,” the man – Gwaine – says. “Figure since I’ve got you naked in my bed, I might as well introduce myself.”

He quiets then and the only sound in the room is heavy breathing and the splashing of water, clear against the metal bowl, squeezing through the cloth, dripping, dripping.

Sink down, heavy and down, warmth swept down his limbs, cloth pressing it into his skin, steady pressure pulling him down and down, heavy and down. Shivers spark, spread along the fast-to-cool wick of water, but (as he whimpers and shivers and whines) a blanket folds over his feet and fingers massage warmth back into the cold (burning hot, frozen to ice) pulse of pain in his arm; chase it away again with the careful (sharp like thunder and lancing, spearing hurt through him that he can’t flinch from – too tired, so tired, so – ) scrape of the cloth over the pain in his arm.

But still, the rhythm catches Emrys, tugs at his mind and sucks him into a lazy spiral, down, down, heavy and down, and soon –

– _Water splashes soft against his skin and curls over his face like a mask of smooth silk. The pool sprawls before him, clear and deep and wide, and he sits there alone (and cold). Camelot hides his lady far away, though even from here he would but have to crane his neck to see the glass of her tower room. But he is without the walls, and she within, cut off from him with walls of stone and mortar, thick and impenetrable to her in a way they haven’t been to him since he had been a small boy. Before he had learned how sacred his need to serve the crown in all things. Before his king had set him free._

 _Dawn steams up a mist on the water’s calm surface, light skimming gold across it, through the mist, over his cupped hands. He drinks it in, pulls it deep inside, this light from the sun and the earthen depth of the pool, and something opens wide and blankets the air. A voice spills over inside him, saying_ you are for us, Emrys, and you will always be for us, just as you are of us _, low and resonant in his chest and yet far away, a thread of thought that stretches so far below him that he cannot see its roots._

_He whispers a few words, locks the light into the water, traps the gold and pours it carefully into a small flask so that he can bring his lady a piece of the dawn she never knows outside her dreams and the small view outside her window, broken by turrets and walls that span too high to let the dawn through. He shakes the flask and listens for the shimmering sound of the dawn before he draws away, to Rhyddid. She whickers and nudges at his shoulder with her nose. Emrys smiles and rubs at the mud that had dried between her eyes. It flakes away under his fingers, grits against the pad of his thumb, and this, this day feels close to peaceful._

_(and still he can’t escape the piece of him that says,_ your king, he will know you have been dawdling, he will know you stopped to indulge your own fancy, he will hate you for it, and hurt you for it, get up and go before the day grows later still and he knows you’re lazing _, that piece so large it thunders inside him and swallows him whole)._

_He does not shake, as he rides back through the castle gates, but he wishes he could. Wishes for some way to shiver away this feeling (of fear) that grows in him._

_But in her room, his lady, the Witch of Camelot, lies sleeping and he has time to set the flask on her bedside table. He opens it so that the dawn upon the water ripples through the room. On her bed, she stirs, wakes and smiles; laughs in delight (them both willing themselves to forget that they are still within the same stone walls that have trapped them for so long) and throws her arms around him._

_He remembers the firebrand warmth of her skin when he kneels before his king and tells him of the druid camp he saw in his patrol. It helps the coldness that he’s slowly starting to understand has long held his heart in an icy grip._

(Warmth soaking into him, firebrand warmth, and Emrys shivers on a bed of cheap linen and scratchy hay, mind blanking, hollowing out, slipping and sliding away from him again.)

Emrys drowses, when he is dry again, in the warmth, in the heat of the sun, the heat of the fire – the pyre!

(Flame rising high, loud and fierce, snapping and cracking wood and stone and bone and flesh, long hair flashing, snapping, cracking into sudden heat, the Witch screaming, and above it all _you weren’t there, you were gone and she died and you were gone, you could have stopped it all but you were gone_.)

Bursts awake (gasping, sweating, too tired to push himself up to sit) to see Gwaine creeping back into the room, holding a small wooden bowl rounded over with moldy bread crusts.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” (Panic, thrash, too weak, too tired, shivering and aching with sickness and sadness.) “Whoa, whoa, calm down, that creep’s gone, back into bed. Easy, there. Boy, he really did a number on you, didn’t he? Wish I could’a kept him back a while, showed him a thing or two. But, well.” Gwaine sits at a small table and lays out a small length of clean linen. He frowns in a thoughtful sort of way before picking up the cloth and tearing it into small strips of fabric. It rips noisily, but he speaks over it. “You weren’t looking so good, all tied up on the ground there.”

He pours a small splash of water into the bowl and swipes the crust around the sides, softening them, before standing up and carrying the bowl and the strips over to the bed where Emrys lies. Emrys tries to move, but the room moves around him too, and he loses his arms and his legs to the tide.

“Got something here to help with the red lines in your skin. The poisoning.”

Gentle hand pressing down on his chest until he lies down, and cool pasty bread pressed over his arm and massaged into his skin (calming, deep as the ocean, the pull of the earth, the smell of the sky – there it is, the secret within him, come back _and you can never lose what you are_ , who said that?) and squishing with soft, slimy fingers into the flapping gape in his arm.

“Too bad there aren’t any druids for leagues,” Gwaine says as his fingers gentle linen bandaging over Emrys’s skin, pressing the mess of moldy, softened breads close against him. His voice sounds worried. “This always did work better with, ah, you know. Their _druidic power_. But we’ll just have to make do.”

 _No,_ says Emrys, says the son of the sea and the earth and the sky (and no one else, not a single other person, and certainly not a tyrant king).

It rises from within him, from the well that stretches down forever, into the pit of darkness that hides a secret (treasured and unknowable) – a power that stretches through time.

“ _Ddaear, iachâ fi; wybren, cadw fi; y môr, diogelu i mi._ ”

“Huh. Well, I guess that’s handy.”

Darkness squeezes his mind through a rush of silence and into a pit of emptiness. He cannot see (he is blind with sickness and terror and magic) and he cannot will his eyes to work, nor his limbs to do aught but tremble.

A cold hand folds over his brow, tentative, shaking slightly at the heat he’s throwing off; low voice, saying, “Just hang on, just hang, that’s right, that’ll be fine, just,” before breaking into scattered mutterings punctuated by the spread of clean, cool salve. He runs away and finds –

– _a room gone white – curled before a fire in a room so white with frost that his bones ache with it, and the chill edges further through the room the longer she sleeps. So long, this time; cold leaches through to the bones of his fire, and it flickers; dims; limps to what will soon be its slow death. She has been dreaming for days, her mind a crazed torrent of colour and sound Emrys cannot slow down enough to understand. But that is how it has ever been, since the Witch was introduced to Camelot’s court in the summer of her last free year. She is like him, but not; close, but still unknowable. A bird trapped inside a cage, a castle of walls too high to see beyond, even from her tower window, struggling still to burst free – but he will never let her._

_(He will never be alone again.)_

_Frost slips under his feet, wooden heels sounding sharply through the chambers. Emrys pauses at the door. She is sleeping, and will be sleeping yet for hours. Her mind spins rapid, wheeling thoughts and half formed images, and if he grits his teeth and concentrates hard, he can tease out the image of a steel sword, shining in the sun, writ with gold down the blade. But soon, he loses his grasp on the picture and it slips from him like a hazy dream chased off by the rising day. If this is like her other times of long wandering – through her own thoughts and deeper into other worlds – she will wake confused._

_She told him why, once. It had been before the fuzzy wash of sleep had cleared away from her mind. She had told him about her pool (“Green,” she had said, “and golden.”) that opens for her as she wanders between worlds, past and future and other nows. Before his king had bid him to stop her, she had visited another now frequently, waking afterwards confused; asking Emrys (gripping him tight by the arm, wild eyed) whether she was dreaming still, or if she was being caged again._

_That had stopped when Emrys had started tethering her to the path Uther chose._

_Blankets lie heavy on the bed, but she sweats in a fever of effort, eyes glowing with a white edge when they slip open, bright enough to lance the pale room and throw shadows on the wall. Her legs have kicked the heaviest furs to the bottom of the bed, flung far enough to curl around the bedpost. Her knuckles twist in the sheets, white silk splotched with frost creeping from the clutch of her magic. Ice curls at the feet of the bed and rimes the soft tips of the carpeting furs._

_Emrys softens his exit, presses the sound of the door’s hinge away from the room. She will be sleeping yet for hours and the birds in her resting room have yet to be fed. His long strides down the hall bend and twist and darken, until he walks through the last doorway and falls for a long time._

\--

Water washes down his throat more smoothly than Gwaine remembers. But then, it has been a long while since he’s given it a chance, really. Two days spent watching the stranger on his bed, sleeping on a folded blanket on the ground, fearing the worst but remembering the guttural, slippery words the stranger had spoken over his own wounds and hoping for the best. Gwaine is tired, and painfully sober.

The sun spears through his eyes and blood thumps in his head, but something tells him that maybe this is it. That this is the call he has been waiting for, since he left the druids to their solitude and wandered from town to town a bitter wreck, hoping that maybe what Aneirin had been telling him was true ( _you are important; you will be loved; you are above all strong_ ) and fearing, as the years went on, that it wasn’t.

The stranger on his bed turns onto his back, but before Gwaine can pull him back onto his side – choking on vomit is not exactly on anyone’s list of ways they want to die – he opens his eyes and awkwardly holds his head up, neck thick with tension and shaking.

“Finally awake for good, then, sunshine?”

Gwaine stretches where he lies on the floor and watches the stranger sit up, leaning back on his arms, to peer owlishly around the room, looking vaguely alarmed but thoroughly confident.

Well. That makes a lot of sense, actually, Gwaine thinks as he remembers gold eyes and the tugging warp of power that thudded through the room, days ago.

“Where – ” the stranger coughs. “Where am I? I remember, there was a man taking me. I think I was – must’ve banged my head.”

“Maybe, but what worried me was the infection. From the hole in your arm. Don’t worry, it’s gone now. The infection. Took care of that already. And that man is gone, too. I’m Gwaine, do you remember?”

The stranger tilts his head, sweaty hair falling in clumps over his eyes. “I owe you a life debt. Thank you, Gwaine.”

Gwaine smiles, says, “Anytime. So, what’s your name, then? I’d be remiss if I let the tall, dark, and handsome stranger in my debt leave without at least getting his name.”

The stranger pauses, looking with shy eyes out through the window, before he says, “Merlin.”

“So, Merlin. You need any help getting anywhere?”

“No, I’ll be fine. Point me to my clothes, and I’ll be off.”

Gwaine shakes his head, rueful. “Sorry, mate. I travelled with the Druids. You were infected. Curse of infection hides in the folds of the fabric. Didn’t want to keep that around so I burned ‘em outside a couple nights ago.”

Merlin sighs. “Is there a weaver’s anywhere in town?”

“‘Course there is! This is Warligon, mate. Best city for bartering in cloth this side of the border with Essetir. Take your pick of colour, even, though I don’t suppose you’ve got the coin for it.”

Merlin smirks at that, and yes, that’s a look Gwaine thinks is very familiar.

“But you’re thinking you don’t exactly need coin, do you? Got your magic and all.”

Gwaine had thought Merlin might startle at that, but he doesn’t. Just laughs, and says, “Yeah, something like that.”

“Market should be open by now, so it might be a bit tricky to run off with any tunics. No stall ever left unattended, not with so much fabric this pricey.”

Merlin laughs again as he pulls on a pair of Gwaine’s breeches he finds on the floor and says, “I’ll be back soon to return these.” He snags a loose tunic and doesn’t bother tying it shut at the chest – not that Gwaine does, either, but at least Gwaine fills out the shirt enough that it manages to look artful.

The stairs creak under Merlin’s feet (until he frowns at them with gold eyes). Gwaine watches him cross the marketplace through the window. At first, he doesn’t see how he’ll do it – too many people, all too aware of the expense of their goods. But then, Merlin waves a hand at hip height, and the sound of wood splintering, cracking under a great weight, crashes through the market. A stand of foreign fruits falls to the ground, peaches and oranges and melons rolling through the street, peddlers crying out, children snatching at the passing fruit and running off with giddy laughter, parents screaming for them to _get back here, right this instant_ , urchins using the distraction to pull trinkets off nearby stands and merchants (slow in their heavy silks) catching them with hoarse anger.

In the confusion, even Gwaine – though he’s watching for it – barely notices Merlin (confident, straight-backed, and with unexpectedly practiced sleight of hand) snatch a bolt of tough black fabric from a stall just across the lane and walk swiftly and with purpose away from the mess.

Gwaine laughs; is still laughing when Merlin walks back through the doorway of their – his – room and presents the fabric with a flourish.

“There. See?” Merlin says. He passes a hand over the fabric and mutters something, eyes spinning with gold. The fabric jumps, twists, and furls into a plain tunic, heavy breeches, and a black cloak.

“Did you burn the clasp of my cloak, as well? Or was the infection hiding in the metal hook?”

Gwaine imagines the eye-roll. He must be imagining the eye roll.

“Oi, I’ll have you know I just saved your life, and by burning your things, I may have saved it another time over!”

“Yes, yes. Well?” Merlin raises an eyebrow and holds his hand out.

Gwaine grumbles before digging through his pack and pulling out a bronze clasp. It’s weighty and expensive, vine detailing around the circlet, pin through the centre sharp and firm.

“Should keep that as payment for services rendered,” Gwaine says, turning it over and over in his palm. “But I’ve a soft spot for scrawny urchins.”

Merlin’s face at that pulls back into a wash of indifference, head tilting back like every courtier that Gwaine had hated so much, as a boy, because why look at him at all if it was all going to be down the nose? But with Merlin, there’s a softness edging around his eyes, a confused tilt to his eyebrows. Something that tells Gwaine that this is the boy’s only known response to kindness – indifference.

“Thank you,” Merlin says, as he pulls the cloak around himself and pins it at his right shoulder. He says it with the uneasy tone of someone not used to saying it at all. He says it like Gwaine would. “I am in your debt. Truly.”

“Anytime,” Gwaine says. And he means it, he does. Maybe this is what the druids had always talked about – being strength for those who needed it, forging alliances across the firm divisions of Camelot. But before he can offer to maybe tag along, volunteer his steel to the cause, whatever cause it is that Merlin is obviously fighting, Merlin tugs the window open, plants a boot on the sash, and pushes off, out into the air. Gwaine lets out a startled cry – because hey, he didn’t spend all that time sleeping on the floor for nothing, for an ungrateful wretch – and rushes to the window, leaning out to see –

– to see Merlin warp in the air, a single smooth beam of light bending around him, into the form of a falcon.

A merlin falcon.

Gwaine laughs. Merlin, indeed.

 

**4**

Smoke stings sorely at his eyes and pricks tears to spread along his lashes. Arthur had grown up around campfires like this one, and yet not at all like this one. On patrols – just around the borders of Camelot, nothing very far from the king and the safety of his sorcerer – where cold crowded in so swift and sure that the men felt no shame in huddling close together before a campfire, shoulder to shoulder, breath mingling as they told each other bawdy jokes and laughed when Arthur, eleven years and young, didn’t understand them. There, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh with his father’s knights, pressed tight like a den of wolves, Arthur learned of brotherhood, and a loyalty never found in his father’s false court. It had been like having brothers, Arthur decided, and he had thought (not for the first time, and certainly never for the last) that he would have loved very much for his mother to have lived to spread their family a little wider.

But here, Arthur sits by himself, knees kept too hot and back shivering with cold, feeling the absence of his men like he would feel the blow of a mace some hours after it had happened.

Moonlight brightens the sky, and Arthur keeps his head tilted back, watching for the dark flash of wings; waiting for the thud of pressure heavy against the tender insides of his ears. Arthur knows how to kill a boar set to rampage; cut down a stag before it can finish its panicked flight away; disguise himself from hunting wilderoen. But dragons had been things of hidden myth for him, forbidden and horribly unknowable for all his life. Things of magic that Arthur fears he will never understand, because he thought he knew a thing of magic once – Emrys, who braided young green stems through Llamrei’s mane when he sat carefully at the edge of the glade, resting with the horses while the knights crowded close together for luncheon – and this is where it has brought him. Unprepared and hurt in so many ways, by someone he hadn’t even known could hurt him. Perhaps he should have known, but Arthur had always been good at ignoring anything that would make his life as Crown Prince and golden son of Uther Pendragon difficult.

The wood Arthur had found scavenging through the nearby trees cracks with moisture as it burns and smokes heavily, sap popping and sparks flying, fire flashing quick through the pine needles and bearded moss. Arthur gently prods a few larger branches into place so that their thinner edges catch alight, and he blows at the roots of the fire, trying to remember how Sir Bedivere had shown him, back when Arthur was yet young and unaware that he, as Crown Prince, would probably never need to light a fire of his own.

Wind twists around the fire, slow and lazy, pulling smoke low over Leon’s face until he wheezes and coughs, flinching away. Arthur quietly panics and crawls over to him – knees popping, upper back a misery of ripping pain from the dragon’s claws, arms shaking with exhaustion – to move him beside Owain, upwind of the fire. As carefully as Arthur tries to move him, Leon’s eyes slip open, watering heavily and glazed with sickness.

“Arthur?”

Arthur settles Leon down, twisting his heavy winter cloak more firmly around Leon’s shaking shoulders. Blood makes the fabric stiff and weighty.

“So much heavy smoke,” Leon rasps. “She burned into such heavy smoke.”

Right. Leon had been there, the day the Witch had burned. A knight of Leon’s standing, he would have been tasked with guarding the pyre, sword trained on the sorceress just in case she fought to free herself.

“They set alight the kindling and she looked me in the eye.” Leon’s voice halters, but he batters through the rest with the force of his stubborn will. “Arthur, if we don’t find them – the Druids – and if I…” Coughing, gasping, blood flecking his lips and Arthur doesn’t know where to out his hands so he settles for rubbing at Leon’s chest. “Tell him – Emrys – that the Witch of Camelot was named Morgana. She wanted him to know. Her name was Morgana.”

“We will find them, Leon. It will be fine.” Arthur settles his palm on Leon’s forehead, uneased by the shock of heat burned by Leon’s fever.

“I promised her, Arthur.” Leon’s throat clicks as he swallows dry around the tacky blood in his mouth. “I promised I would tell him, and now you must do the same.”

Arthur thinks that Leon might have been a little bit in love with her, the caged thing that Uther hoarded like a miser’s gold, if the look in his eyes – drifting in his fevered haze and yet sad beyond what a knight would admit – is anything to go by.

“Then I promise. And when we find out that I’ve sworn a needless oath – for we _will_ find the Druids, and they _will_ have the Cup of Life – I’ll be forced to give you latrine duty all the way back to Camelot.

“Now be quiet, Leon,” Arthur murmurs, but Leon has already slipped under again.

The night stretches around them, something large enough to make Arthur feel smaller than he ever felt. And there have been so many times in Arthur’s life when the world felt so huge around him that he thought there was nothing he could do that would ever make it better. Like when he had been a child of four and his father’s knights had brought to the castle a babe in arms with yellow eyes and a wail that could shake the castle’s foundations but never quite brought any towers tumbling down. He remembers still the wonder he had felt when he felt that small voice – a voice too young to speak in aught but shared vision seen through young, blurred eyes; a voice that knew not the words to express its fear – curl up inside his mind. Emrys, his father had called that child.

Uther had taken that babe and hidden him in a darkness Arthur doubts he will ever understand. Hidden him away, so deep and so dark and away, and twisted him into something more a monster, but never quite.

That is important, the never quite. It lets Arthur hope for Emrys. The wretch that had been kept so close by Uther’s side, filching meats and scraps of fruit to feed his secret army of hawks and falcons that Arthur, guardian of Camelot’s halls even at such a young age, pretended not to know about, for he would not be the one to take them away. Father had always taught him not to ask another to do a thing you yourself would not.

(Arthur had known the pain of loneliness, and though his father swore _monster_ , all Arthur could ever find was _empty little boy_.)

The night bends soft around them, and wrapped in the stars and the loneliness of the empty fire, Arthur struggles to find peace enough to sleep.

Setting out from Camelot, twenty loyal men had split themselves between three campfires, and the night’s watch was shared between two stolid knights for three hours at a time. Now, Arthur shivers where the cold grabs at his shoulders and worries at what might find all that remains of Camelot’s bravest knights if he dares to rest his eyes, even for a second.

Deep in the forest, a tree rumbles and falls, cracking through the loose spring air, and Arthur flinches at the sound so like a dragon’s roar. Shivers steal the strength from his limbs, and the proud red of Camelot marks him clear in a forest he would fain hide in, and his men are dead or dying. Arthur shuffles Hengroen’s saddlebags so he can lean back and keep an eye on Owain and Leon where they lie, so still that they might be dead but for how their breath still raises mists in the air. Time slips and slides through his unsteady fingers, until not even fear can hold Arthur’s eyes open.

Dawn bleeds unevenly over the horizon, slipping between the trees in lurching gasps, as Arthur slips in and out of sleep, propped up against his horse’s saddlebags, back sore against tough leather and edged awkwardly on the pommel. Thin welts strap across Arthur’s palms where he holds tight to the hilt of his sword, fingers cramping in the cold night, and every time he shifts, burned and ripped skin pulls across the back of his neck.

Arthur shakily jerks upright when the sky blooms to a burnished shine of colour, joints popping and feet still buzzing with sleep. The red of his Camelot cloak snaps harsh against his eyes; his eyes that burn with a fear that becomes so much harder to ignore with so little sleep and so much time spent wandering the wasteland between awake and dreaming, lost betwixt and running still. The dragon chases his every thought, and he must find the Druids, he must.

The last embers of the fire hide sullen in the ash that has swept around the edges of the dugout, swirling in tiny little cyclones of grit, but Arthur has left himself no wood from the last night’s panicked rush to warm Leon and Owain as they shook, and there is no time to hunt for any dry tinder. Spring leaves the forests perpetually damp, and musty and sick with rot in wood that would otherwise have been dry. The two horses spared from the dragon’s fire champ their feet and stand close together, muscles shaking in tired shudders, breath puffed white in the air.

Leon sleeps too heavily to struggle as Arthur fights to set him up onto Hengroen, desperately trying to keep his arms from dropping Leon entirely as their movement pulls on the burns running across the backs of his shoulders, threatening to pull the claw-ripped flesh apart again. A worrisome silence, and if Arthur hadn’t been terrified before, he would be now – and Owain moans, folded over his leg, eyes thick with exhaustion.

“Owain!” Arthur says, voice heavy and weighted.

Owain blinks, eyes brightening in the light the sun casts low about them and clearing as Arthur shakes him by his shoulders.

“Owain, can you keep on riding?”

He nods at Arthur, shakes his head and frowns to himself, then nods again.

“Just,” Arthur starts again, then pauses. “Can you sit steady in the saddle for another day? One more and we can rest a bit longer.”

Owain starts to nod again, but stops. Says, “Yes, Arth – yes, Sire. Help me up. I can follow, if you lead the way.”

And that, that, is easier to believe. Arthur grits his teeth and hoists Owain up by the bunching of cloak under his armpits, coaxing a foot into the stirrups and grappling with Owain’s long legs. Owain leans forward, curling over the pommel, but he pulls at his own leg ineffectually, hissing in pain. Arthur grabs his boots and shoves it roughly over the horses back. The horse – a mare with strong, clean lines, Bedivere’s favoured, gods guard and keep his soul, and there are, so many to bury when they returned to Camelot – bows her head and stands steady, though Owain’s unsteady grasp pulls harsh at her mane as he hoists himself up to lean over her neck.

Silence creaks between the trees, but still Arthur sighs and falls to an almost-ease, because the clear wash of safety spins around his spine, and nothing tells him that anything is wrong, anything at all, but for Leon’s bloodied lungs and Owain’s worsening infection. But those, they do not pull at him as the presence of the dragon had, before his attack, or how Emrys’s presence ever had.

(But Emrys, sometimes Arthur thinks his company might have pulled at him for another reason entirely. Not for the crackling of his magic or the spark of his power, but something that tugged at him deeper; more full. Something that pulled at the roots of his gut, and that found him at the edge of night and sometimes at the edging of the dawn.

Arthur had shivered and thought often to himself, _no. You will have a queen, and you will give to her the heirs of Camelot. You cannot indulge; you cannot pretend,_ even though Arthur knew this would ever be the closest he ever came to baring the truth to himself. But the looming threat of halfway-unknowable prophecy, and of carrying on a dynasty of conquerors, had drawn guilt tight around the breadth of his wanting.)

Hengroen bears Arthur as well as Leon with a steady ease, and with Owain’s mare tied to Hengroen’s saddle, Arthur walks them both slow through the forest.

Hours of slogging through the forest, holding Leon tight and upright and worrying as his head lolls and his breathing begins to rasp, fall upon Arthur in a sudden heap: the sun sinks into the afternoon, dimming the bright shine on the leaves to a burning gold, and heaviness pulls on Arthur, a weight hanging from his neck. Heavy, hanging lowly, pulling him down and down and inside himself. Beneath him, Hengroen huffs and champs, startling Arthur back to himself, briefly, but –

– down and down, pulling him down, eyes clamped shut and too hard to open, a dizzying press upon his mind, a voice not his own whispering, _sleep, hush now and quiet, and sleep, Pendragon. Hush now, and quiet and sleep._ Steady susurrations patter soft as summer rain through thick foliage over him, steadying him, pulling him down and down.

Arthur falls, pulling Leon down with him. The ground hits Arthur with weight enough to knock the air from his lungs.

“Arthur!”

And Arthur wants to say, _It’s okay, Owain, I’m fine, I’m just so tired, everything’s fine,_ but he has no air left to push through his mouth, and he’s too tired to drag in more. His head drops down onto the scratching of the bracken, sticks and fluttering leaves poking at his skin, his eyes, but that’s okay. That’s fine.

Arthur breathes, and sleeps.

\--

“ – don’t do something, he’s going to die!”

Sound crackles jagged through Arthur’s ears, brittle edged and painful.

“And so what? He’s of Pendragon’s ilk, a knight sworn to Camelot. He is no friend of ours, and he’s a sworn enemy of Emrys.” A man’s voice now, firm and decisive and derisive as any of Uther’s councilmen.

Soppy and desperate breathing punctuates the argument breaking out over Arthur. Someone dying, right close to him.

“They may be our enemies, but to stand aside and watch them die is beneath us, Idwal.” A woman, voice low and solid, soft with the gentling of years. “The Tyrant King Uther may have dictated the terms of our lives for years, but he doesn’t have to rule us still, now that he’s gone..”

“You think in such simple lines, Ceridwen. Those of us tasked with the defense of our people against Camelot’s rabid dogs don’t have that luxury.”

Wet chill slinks up Arthur’s back and his next breath shudders through him, teeth chattering together. Soreness pulls at his side and an ache pulses sluggish through his head.

“He’s waking!” A boy, a young boy – _much like those you’ve killed before, Arthur. All in the name of your father._

“Bran, fetch us some water and a cloth. And then run and find Aneirin!” Then, softer, in the secret hushed tone Arthur had once heard a mother in the market use while talking so that her child might not hear, “He’s been sleeping for so long, Idwal. You needn’t have lain such a powerful spell of sleep on him. He’s sick, and laden with sadness besides.”

“Leon,” Arthur says over the man’s – Idwal’s? – answering grunt, “and Owain. Where are my men?” Pain sticks to the back of his throat, a dry ache that won’t be wetted.

“Quiet, Pendragon.” Idwal glares at him fiercely. “You have no power here. Not anymore. Not without your pet slave to back you up.”

Arthur opens his eyes and blinks through the brightness, through the tears that rim along his lashes. Sunshine spreads along the forest floor. He struggles onto his elbows, fighting to keep his head from sagging down, but as soon as he sees Leon – lying on the ground, ribs that Arthur had wrapped soaking the linen red, breathing ragged and dying – Arthur bursts upright.

“Leon! Please, you must help him, please.” Arthur’s voice is soaked in desperation, and Arthur remembers every time his father had told him that to plead was to be weak; to show anyone how fiercely you loved your men was to slay them where they stood. But Arthur can’t help it; Arthur is too weak to stop the strangled whine from squeezing out through his throat. “Please, please, I know you can help him.”

Red foams through Leon’s mouth with every breath, and red pulses from that damn spot on his ribs. Arthur remembers – they had fallen. They had fallen together off Hengroen, and Leon’s damn broken ribs – they must have... must’ve punctured his lung – oh, God, gods, whoever might be out there, his _lungs_. Leon thrashes on his deathbed of moss, and blood foams into a mesh of bubbles in his mouth, and he’s choking, he’s choking.

“I know you can help him. Balinor – he told us – you have the Cup of Life, the Dragonlord Balinor told us you could help my men!”

The two druids standing before him look at each other grimly, and Arthur knows that though they seemed divided as they argued over him, before a Pendragon they would stand united.

“Balinor?” Idwal’s eyebrows pulled tight together. “Balinor would never have told any knight of Camelot where to find us. Ceridwen, they do you think they…?”

Ceridwen – a tall woman with a clear skinned face, framed by two heavy blonde braids streaked with pale grey – shakes her head.

“No, look at them. Not even all together could they have overpowered our wild man of the woods while in such a state. And if Balinor volunteered us to their cause of his own free will – Idwal, you must see. The Fates have given us our path.”

A boy runs up to them with a skin of water, dragging at his heels a man with a strong nose and hair slung back and tied. He flinches when he sees Leon, dying and red and so, so red.

“Please,” Arthur says, quiet. Broken already, because he has seen what happens to a man dying like this. The slow suffocation, drowning in a heaviness of blood, mouth full of foam that bursts and pools thick. Leon flails, limbs struggling as his lungs starve, clawing at his own throat, fighting to breathe, fighting.

“Aneirin! Quick, you have the cup with you, I trust?” Ceridwen holds her hand out to the man – Aneirin – the arms of her robes rolling back to her elbows. Aneirin grabs onto her hand and they both throw a hand out to Idwal.

“Bran, pour some water in the Cup and set it between us.”

They form a circle around Leon, kneeling and waiting for Bran to hunt through Aneirin’s bag, drawing out a simple gold goblet. His tongue pokes between his teeth as he pours water from his skin into the goblet, most of it splashing horribly over the edges. As soon as he sets it in the middle of the three, tucked close to Leon’s seizing face, Aneirin starts chanting, Ceridwen and Idwal joining him.

Arthur panics and jolts up to his feet – too soon, his head filling with haze, ground sweeping out from under his feet. He falls – again – and though he tries to stay awake, because Leon must be saved, he _must_ , he can’t overpower the rising blackness in his mind.

\--

He wakes again, head full of needles and mouth flinching from the tang of blood where his teeth had bitten into his tongue.

“Bran,” he hears Ceridwen say, through the dumb fog smothering his mind. “He’s not quite here yet. Slap him again.”

A smack, a stinging on his skin, a force pushing his cheek into the grit of dirt, crushing his nose against the ground. Arthur snarls and whips his head up and around, but before he can say anything, a voice cuts through the haze he’s half-stumbled out from.

"Listen to us. Listen, King Arthur." Ceridwen grabs Arthur's chin with one wiry hand and tilts his face up. The air around him drunkenly wobbles and he can’t quite make his eyes meet Ceridwen’s face at all. Her braids hang heavy and knock against his forehead. “You must listen now. We haven’t much time before it’s too late.”

“Too late?” Arthur tries to catch his thoughts all together, but they flicker between the fingers of his grasping hand. “Isn’t it already too late?”

Ceridwen breathes out a rapid sigh, chopping the end short to say, “Yes, for one path it became too late twenty five years ago, and another, not even a week ago, and a dozen more besides have probably been passed in the day we’ve had you sitting here in camp.”

But. “But – “

“That’s not the point! The point is that we have another chance to set Albion to rights – at peace, united, and strong against the invaders who knock their boats even now against our shores. And _that_ is the path we must hurry for.”

“Here,” Aneirin kneels beside Arthur’s head and eases him up until he’s sitting, leaned back against Aneirin’s chest. Exhaustion aches slowly through his limbs, and as soon as Emrys or the dragon finds him again, his life will be forfeit anyway, so why, so why – why should he still bother pretending he’s at all capable of fulfilling his oath to his people as their king?

“You shouldn’t think such dark thoughts,” Aneirin says, calm and soft and without looking Arthur in the eye.

Arthur flinches. “You should not pry into my mind. You may have me at your mercy, but I have your honour at mine.”

Aneirin pulls a small flask bound in soft leather from his bag, pops the stopper out, and holds it to Arthur’s lips. “Here,” he says, “this will set your head to rights.”

The draught, thick like the syrup his second nanny used to pour over his secret oatmeal night lunches but bitter and vile, fills his throat until he gags and swallows, sluggish and panicked.

A heavy hand massages along his throat until Arthur swallows along with it, desperate and affronted all at once. Aneirin hums and says, “Yes, I thought so, too. But that’s the last of it.” And he keeps Arthur sitting upright as he beckons towards Bran for a skin of water.

Arthur tries to say, “Thank you,” but the tack in his mouth stills his tongue, so he settles with nodding at Bran as he grabs at the skin held out to him. The air clears and stills around him; the cool breeze washes his mind clean and dry and a new mist of rain wakes him fully. Water pools in his mouth. He swishes and spits; wipes his sleeve over his face, sleeve catching on the sticky corners of his mouth where the draught had leaked out.

“How is Leon? Did it work? And – Owain. His leg. I think it’s become infected. Can you help him?”

“Come, Arthur.”

Arthur shrugs off Aneirin’s hand from his shoulder and rises on unsteady legs. The camp stills, chatter calming down to a hush, hands stilling upon their leatherwork, faces turning to watch Arthur. To watch the Prince – the King – of Camelot take his feet in the middle of this camp that reeks of sorcery.

He swallows and speaks loudly.

“I don’t come to – I swear, I wouldn’t – I bear you no ill will, not to any of you Druids.”

“We know,” Idwal says. His voice rumbles thick from his chest, dark with the years of fear and mistrust Arthur’s father had fostered. “You don’t understand us, do you, young Pendragon?”

Arthur feels a grimace trying to claw its way over his face, but he holds himself still.

“You don’t. You’ve only begun to think of Emrys as a man meant for more than the role of slave that your father tried to mold him into.. But we have been watching for his coming for generations. Albion moves through him, and you cannot stop her any longer. We never thought the Usurper could stop her for so long at all, but the fear of men is a strong thing, and lets the weak minded change the world. But just as Uther broke the land, Albion has named you the one to set her straight. You don’t understand us, Arthur, because you don’t understand Albion.”

Idwal stops, thumb digging hard into the soft curve of his own palm – the only sign of his agitation that Arthur can see. Ceridwen leans forward, laying a firm hand on Idwal’s shoulder.

“Our seers can be proven wrong,” she says, “but not so many over all these years; not over this. We have read of Emrys in the sky, and always has his fate been linked to yours, and to another’s. Your father shook the path, scattered it wild and wide of what past prophesy descried, but he could not wholly break it down. And so still the players remain unchanged: always it will be Courage and Magic upon which the balance hangs.”

“Balance,” Arthur scoffs. “Your balance hangs on a madman and a king orphaned from his parents, knights, and soon his people. How are we meant to bring the land – this thing you call Albion – to rights?”

“By disagreeing with the path you now walk and choosing another. By remembering that this is not the first time you’ve heard of Albion or the Once and Future King – every child knows of those stories, and even princes hear whispers of what is ostensibly forbidden them. By believing in everything your father could never make you hate.”

And Arthur does remember – he remember years ago, listening to the ravings he had thought mad, from a woman lost to visionary wanderings. The Witch of Camelot had tried to tell him about this Once and Future King, and about Albion and her conduit, but Arthur had never been of a mind to listen. Too busy trying to shutter his mind to everything wrong that flooded through it – everything his father abhorred, from the vice of unnatural lust to the sickness in his stomach he felt whenever he saw another pyre burning, stoked high against the wind.

“That’s why, Arthur Pendragon, you need to go find Emrys. Now, before the path you’re walking shifts again and leaves your destined kingship to die in the dust.”

“But my men,” Arthur says, shaking his head through the ebb and flow of its ache. His legs shiver under him. “I can’t leave them, and I can’t face Emrys like – like I am.”

(His father’s voice in his head, wondering at Arthur’s weakness, even though _Father would never tell me a thing like that. Never would have. Not my father._

 _Oh, but didn’t he? With every grimace at your inability to fully stomach his battle against sorcery, he said this to you, and more, though he might not have meant to. Might not even have wanted to, but still you heard everything he never said._ )

“Arthur,” Ceridwen says, grabbing Arthur by the bunching of tunic at his shoulder. “Hear this now, because you won’t hear it again from any other Druid: if you don’t stop Emrys and turn him from his warpath, nobody will want to live in the world he creates. Not even us. It will be raw with grief and fear and unslaked vengeance. And right now, that still seems damnably appealing to so many of us, but it won’t remain so for long. By the time we’ve moved beyond our craving for revenge, we won’t be able to stop him; we still won’t admit that we _need_ to stop him.

“But though Emrys is the will of Albion incarnate, _you_ are the one she’s been waiting for.”

At that, Aneirin and Idwal both nod, the former firm and sure and the latter pulling his face into a sad resignation.

“The signs are clear,” Idwal says. “You are our Once and Future King, young Pendragon. We will – we will stand by you, in our way.”

Arthur snorts. “And what exactly does that mean?”

Idwal shifts, eyes hunting along the horizon, sliding away from Arthur as though too uncomfortable to look at him for long.

“It means that even though we will always be for Emrys, Emrys will always be for you. It means that if we don’t tell you to go after him, now, and stop him, he’s going to run himself into a ruin of his own making. He’s going to end up as cruel a tyrant as your father.

“I don’t like you,” Idwal continues, “and I don’t trust you. But for Emrys, none of us have a choice but to believe in what you could be: the Once and Future King.”

Spring softens the air and the wet of the rain pulls the composure from Arthur’s face. He shivers, mouth twisting down, but he doesn’t lower his eyes. He is a Pendragon. He is the only, and probably the last, Pendragon. This he can do for his heritage.

Arthur clears his throat and asks, “Where are you keeping my men?”

The tent they lead him to (and here, a comfort where he has found so few – the more steps Arthur takes, the more he can feel the strong pulse of the earth rising up, lashing itself to his limbs and settling resolve into his bones; stripping his exhaustion and flooding him with courage) hovers on the outskirts of the camp. From what Arthur knows of the Druids – learned mostly from the study of their wrecked camps after he has seen whole clans slain, the guilt in him begging him to remember them, remember everything about them, the smallest penance paid – this clan is of a middling size, though there seems to be an inordinate number of children. They stare at him, and they look afraid and angry in equal parts.

“They come from other camps, Pendragon.” Aneirin walks beside Arthur. His face is brittle and bitter, and he very carefully doesn’t look at Arthur at all. (Arthur is glad for it.) “They are the ones who have escaped your men.”

 _Who have escaped you,_ Aneirin doesn’t say, but could. Arthur hears it anyway.

“So this is where they ran to,” Arthur says, mostly to himself. It had soothed the hard knot in his chest the smallest bit, how Emrys would sit upon his horse beside Arthur and do nothing, absolutely nothing, to help Camelot hunt down the fleeing Druids once he had ripped aside panicked defenses of crackling magic and sent the shamans to their death before they could try for anything more.

Nausea lived for years in Arthur’s belly over those hunts. Over how he would gather from his knights the most determined, most ruthless, and gird them with steel and Camelot red around their shoulders. How Arthur would ride out with them, Emrys following wraith-quiet beside him with a mind Arthur knew had always been set on the Witch, looking for gifts to brighten her dead and hollow chambers. How Arthur would order that none be left alive, and how thick the air became with the smell of rust and iron, and acrid fear.

But Emrys had always sat back on his horse, impatience shaking down the lines of his body, while Arthur’s men hacked away, stirring not once to still the legs of any Druids who managed to break away from the clustered glut of swords. And Arthur was glad; is still glad.

He presses the base of his palm hard against his chest as he stops beside Aneirin at the flap of a tent of white skins, muddied at the base by the ground and the splashing of mud. In his chest his heart feels like a twisted knot that he has carried for almost all his life, never quite able to unravel it.

The tent is dark inside, and the air lies thick with incense on Arthur’s skin. Magic tangles in his joints and sparks at his fingertips. Arthur shivers against it, but this is the magic that has lifted Owain from the darkness of the sickness that had spread from the festering of his leg.

The space Aneirin pulls Arthur into is small and warm, furs laid thick upon the floor, gathered in the middle beside a small banked fire. The thin trail of smoke floats cleanly up through a small opening at the top of the tent. Owain lies bundled in the thick of the furs, face calm in its rest. His forehead gleams with a thin sheen of sweat and his bandaged thickly. Beside him, Leon lies curled atop a small pallet, hand splayed over his own ribs as though to keep them safe and whole.

“Leon at least will be well enough to ride easily in two or three days, sire. The Cup has taken from him all trace of illness, but the energy it sapped from him will take time to return. Owain will have to wait perhaps a few days longer before he’s strong enough to leave the camp, but the infection in his blood has begun to fade away already.” Aneirin quiets and turns to leave Arthur alone with his men, a courtesy Arthur would not have expected of a person whose people Arthur himself had so recently hunted into the ground.

Arthur sits cross-legged beside the small fire and stokes it gently. He waits there as his men – the only two of the twenty he had set out with who live still – sleep as though dead, silent as shivers born of the shock of magic wrack through them. The Druids wish them to live. And so they will, Arthur determines. They will make it through today, and tomorrow, and they will see the sun rise over Camelot in a blush of deep colour again.

Dusk chases in a young boy burdened with two large platters of food. A small boy, with flopping dark hair and eyes wide and grey. His cloak – lined with fur and probably too warm for the season of sun creeping up on Camelot’s lands – flaps about sluggishly, heavy with mud and frayed at the bottom where his heels oft catch. He kicks the flap open a sliver, slides through (carefully, eyes firm on the platters in his hands), and grins once inside, triumphant in the children often are.

Or so Arthur has been led to believe, from his years of observing children running about the castle and through the market in the lower town. Watching them in that vaguely confused manner he used to try so hard to hide, wondering at the ease with which children as old as he was played about the streets.

The boy looks about the tent with a tilted head, the plates in his hands starting to slip downwards, smiling wider as Owain stirs awake.

“Yes? You are?” Arthur says, habit clipping the words short and bending command into his tone, though he meets Owain’s shiny-with-fever eyes and softens his tense posture to nod, relieved, before turning his face to the boy.

The boy startles back to attention.

“Bran – I’m Bran. I’ve come with supper, sire,” Bran says. He sets the platters down on a low table next to Owain’s nest of blankets. “And to say that, that, umm.”

Bran pauses, fingers still clutching at the platters, as though bespelled into stillness.

“That we are coming to join you, my Lord,” Ceridwen says as she enters with Aneirin and Idwal. “We are running out of time, and you need to know much before we send you off again.”

The waft of air they bring with them tastes crisp and wet, and very slightly of pine and fire. They rustle their robes and sit about him in a loose circle, Ceridwen taking care to curl the edge of her robes around the curl of her knees. Next to them, Owain props himself up against the low table, shaky and sick with the exhaustion fever brings.

“Were the hour not so late, I would never have let you stay here among us, no matter your destiny,” Idwal says, “and neither would I offer council. But Emrys marches down a path that would reap more blood than the Tyrant Uther’s purge.” Idwal ignores Arthur’s aborted pass for his sword – because to slander the King is treason – and flicks his eyes over to Ceridwen and then Aneirin. Cautious agreement softens Idwal’s mouth, but the habit of his discord carves lines that linger on his face even when his brow smoothes.

“Emrys stayed with us for a brief while,” Aneirin says. “Left not long after you were crowned, I think.”

“Did he…” Arthur pauses. “Did he tell you why? Why he came to you, why he did what he did?”

Ceridwen smoothes a hand over Leon’s brow, wicks the crusted salt from an old sweat from where it had gathered at the corner of his closed eyes.

“Did you know much of the Witch of Camelot?” she asks.

“I know what she was to Emrys. I know that she was more to him than the keeper of his idle pastime like my father had thought she was.”

“And yet she was more than even you believe. We have legends about her, too. She was the prophesied Betrayer; the sword that cuts at the backs of those she claims allies. It was only because she was yet more even than that – was a person, a woman of strength and fierce compassion and frailty also – that her betrayal forced Emrys’s hand. He loved her deeply, a thing we never foresaw.

“He came to us with two things, Pendragon. A bag full of the Witch’s bones and a promise to bring Camelot to its knees.”

“Well, he has done that,” Arthur says, “but we have not bared our throat yet.”

“No, your courage will never fail, my Lord,” Ceridwen allows. “But Emrys has a lust for vengeance eating at him. He will find you, Arthur, and if you do not leave, he will find you here. He flies fast on wing, tireless, tracking you by the trail of death in your wake; by the knights left behind you. He will find you here, and he will bleed our camp dry in his madness at it.

“You need to leave. If he finds you here, he will kill us all. Hatred rises in him as a sickness; a fever consuming everything he once had been.”

“Find him, Pendragon,” Idwal says. “Find him and lance his sickness away.”

“But I don’t see… I cannot do anything as I am,” Arthur says, his voice sticking thick in his throat. “You won’t stop telling me about the bond between Emrys and myself, but it just doesn’t exist. Not yet, and if I don’t find another way to bring him down, there will never _be_ a bond. And I haven’t the strength to stop Emrys on my own in any other way – even with a group of knights the chance was slim, but by myself? With me, as I am? No, I’m no longer just a prince. Camelot cannot lose another king. I just – I haven’t the strength.”

The Druids around him shift, sharing swift glances and fighting without saying a word of it aloud. Bran, listing off to the side, pinches his face together as he looks curiously between Aneirin and Ceridwen. But before Arthur can ask what they aren’t telling him, Owain speaks up, voice cracked and sore from his illness.

“My cousin – then you must find my cousin, Arthur.” He coughs, great and heaving, and grabs at the water skin Bran offers. “My cousin will give you your strength.”

Owain’s eyes shine and his years fall lightly over his shoulders. So young.

“How can the finding of one man give me the strength to take down a mad sorcerer?” Arthur says, gentle.

“That’s just it,” Owain cries, eyes bright with a dangerous fever that had spread from the red infection leaching through his leg, only now ebbing back. He sits up and leans forward. “That’s it exactly, just ask them, ask the Druids, they’ll know, they always have. Told me once, they did. When he were wandering around with them, before he turned a drunken lout.”

“Owain! Owain, calm down, calm.” Arthur stills Owain’s jittering leg with a steady hand. “What do they know about your cousin?”

Bran tentatively asks, “Do you speak of Gwaine?”

Owain nods with a drooping head, eyelids slipping shut and then startling back open as he fights off sleep.

“My King,” Bran says, “his cousin is Gwaine.” Excitement runs through Bran, shivering down his spine, because this is Right, this is Prophecy, and Fate is reeling her players back along to her sacred path again. “Gwaine the gallant, right born and violently estranged son of King Lot of Orkney. He is the Strength to your Courage, Sire, and with Ma--”

“Bran!” Ceridwen cries. “That is enough.”

“No, please, let him speak, I need to hear,” Arthur says, command edging through his tone once more.

Ceridwen and Aneirin exchange a lingering look, and Arthur thinks he can almost see the thoughts passing between them.

“Arthur,” Ceridwen says, words planted carefully. “He speaks of the old teachings of the stars. They once showed us all the coming of the Trio – Courage, Strength, and Magic – and said that once complete, there will be no challenge they will meet that will prove beyond their skill. But the stars have realigned in the years since the Tyrant’s reign.”

“Careful. You speak of your king,” Arthur barks, instinct long bred into him overriding his sense, but Ceridwen says nothing in return.

“As I said, the stars speak of the Trio in the same way no longer.”

“Mother, that isn’t true!” Bran says. Colour rises high in his cheeks. “I’ve seen it, I saw it, that night where we stayed up late and warmed in front of the fire. And you have, too! I know you did, last week, while we were taking the bedding off the line just after the sun had set. You saw it too, don’t say you didn’t. It’s happening again; something changed and it’s happening as it should.”

“As it should?” Arthur, who had been listening with something akin to interest, speaks up fiercely at that. “You mean to say that this is all because of fate? Some glorious fate that demanded blood sacrifice and a kingdom thrown into ruin, plagued on all sides by dragons and witchcraft, haemorrhaging good men for some berserker’s revenge?”

Bran shrinks back, flinches away from Arthur’s words.

“Please, sire.” Ceridwen grabs Arthur’s forearm. “Please be calm. He is just a boy, and it’s easy, living as we do, to get lost in legend and the prophecies of the sky. He knows not how it plays out, in the real world, where blood is so much more red and flows so much more abundantly.”

Arthur leans back, chastened.

“But he is right, Once and Future King. No, no, he is. About one thing, if not all. If you are to find and stop Emrys from pulling all of Albion down around your ears, you must find Gwaine, son of Lot, known to us as Strength. That, we can all agree on.”

“But how can you not know more? Is there nothing else you can tell me?”

“We are Druids, my King,” Aneirin says. “We see destiny in the stars and we know the path of fate. Your Seer Witch was different. She, the foretold Betrayer, the one who walked the crooked path. She told you often, where the future walked and how to head it off. She had a gift that will nevermore touch this world; not even with the help of crystals plucked from the First Cave itself. You would do well to forget all the ways she once helped you See. You will never find such help again.”

Leon turns in his heavy sleep, and his breath catches a rattle it he seems too tired to shake loose. Arthur and Owain turn to look at him.

“And you will take care of him? That is within your power?” Arthur asks.

“Yes,” Aneirin nods, “we will take care of them both, Owain and Leon. And when we see the signs, we will either send them home, or keep them here and hide them from Emrys so long as we have strength to do so. It depends on you now, Pendragon. If you cannot stop Emrys, then he will become a thing of darkness; he will lose himself, and Albion will lose her will. Camelot will fall, and the rest of Albion will be left waiting to crumble, piece by piece.”

“Arthur, he is coming,” Ceridwen says, “and you must go. You cannot face him here, you must find Strength first. Emrys is coming, and you must go.”

Ceridwen pulls at Arthur’s arm, tugs him to his feet and buckles his sword back onto his belt, pulling his hauberk over his head and tightening the buckles on his gambeson with deft fingers accustomed to spinning thin threads and working needles through tough leather.

“Where am I to go? I cannot wander all of Albion to find this man.”

“Go west,” Bran says. His eyes are soft and distant, flickering gently back and forth, irises curled ‘round with gold and pupils flaring wide. “You will find him south of the border of Essetir, not far from here. A large city but no citadel, thriving market, thick with fabric dyed richly and spooled thread in every colour. But he comes for you, the falcon on wing. He flies swift on a southerly wind.”

“On the border? Large city without a castle, dyes, trade route. Warligon,” Arthur says. “You must be describing Warligon.”

“If you know, then leave now. Take your horse – we’ve fed and watered him, he’s fresh enough now – and go!” Ceridwen slings a filled pack over his shoulder and pushes him out of the tent.

Arthur turns back to say his thanks, to tell them that he will never forget this, but Ceridwen only cries out, “Sire, you must leave, and it must be now, please! He’s coming, and if he finds you here… He will hate us. And we’ve only just got him back.”

Bran rushes forward, hands clutching Hengroen’s reins. Arthur springs up into the saddle, surety crackling through him, hope latching on to his shins and grappling up his spine. Thunder cracks under his horse’s hooves as the forest fades behind him and the road to Warligon stretches on ahead.

It isn’t until he’s five leagues away at least that he roots around in the pack Ceridwen shoved into his arms, looking for a water skin, and finds inside it another, smaller, leather bag. One that, when he opens it, he finds is filled with jutting bone, dry and burnt. Arthur gags at the smell and wonders if the bag is for him – a reminder of Pendragon sin – or for Emrys – a last attempt to lure out his humanity.

Arthur carefully ties the bag and slips it back into the saddlebag and urges Hengroen on again, afraid to linger even now. Dirt kicked up by the hooves of his horse clumps together in the wet and makes a spotted trail behind Arthur. The only tracks along a path seldom trod by horse. He rides out alone and feels the pressing need slung across his shoulders. The Druids – his people, as they should have been from the time his father had sat him down on the straight-backed throne and told him that never was there a love greater than that of a king’s for his people – have turned to him, have helped him and his red-caped men though not two months ago Arthur had been hunting them to the ground. And they might need him, but he needs them more. Debt and duty drive Arthur on, alone on his path between the trees.

 

**5**

Market day. The smells thicken over Gwen’s face in the fuzzy heat of town, pungent and distinct. Well, they aren’t exactly _pleasant_ , in the traditional sense of the word – offal from the pack mules, effusive sweat from the multitude packed into the street, the stench of the tannery carried up from the lower town in the skins brought in to trade, as well as the tanner trading them, and the hanging dread of perfume from the stalls that try in vain to cover it all up – soon she’ll be up into the heart of town, where the rush of the market fades into the more subtle sale of the bakeries and exotic baubles and fine, fancy laces. It will smell quite nicely, up on High Street.

Gwen wrinkles her nose and brushes a curl out of the catch of her eyelashes. The leather isn’t quite thick enough for the bulk of a jerkin, but the strips will do fine for the binding. And perhaps a shining wrap of black dyed leather done to a fine polish for the hilt of the sword she’s nearly finished to send up to the new guardsman. Tom? Timothy?

It’s not like she’s forgotten his name or anything. Gwen is (almost completely) sure it starts with a “T” at any rate. It’s just that he had never been particularly involved in the whole crafting process for the sword. Not that he isn’t important! To the work, at least, he just doesn’t have much of an impact, and so that’s why she has forgotten his name.

“How many d’you want, little lady?” the tanner asks. “Only you’re frowning some’fin awful. But just you know that this here’s the best tested leather in the ‘ole of Warligon. Tough and light. Soft leather wrappings, like that as you’ve got in yer ‘and right now. Nice, rich dye straight in from across the sea. Brought it over myself.”

“The dye – it’s been set, of course?” Gwen asks, trying to remember all her father had told her, before setting her out the door on the hunt for a few odds and ends, about haggling. “Only, I don’t want to wrap my quite fine sword with such lovely colour just to have it fade in my customer’s hand after not even a day of training.” The tanner’s face seems to fall at that, though, and oh, that wasn’t really what Gwen had wanted to happen at all. “Not that I’m saying that your work is shoddy, of course – I just want to make sure. And I’m not saying that you would lie to me about how well the leather is dyed, of course! Ah, I just – “

The tanner smiles. Gwen flushes and hopes her skin has tanned dark enough already that it isn’t obvious. This haggling business is nonsense, anyway. The price given is more than fair already, so why should she try to knock it down any further?

“Tell you what,” the tanner says after a beat. His smile is small but sincere, and Gwen can’t help but smile back. “I’ll give you the pack of leathers and two bundles of strips with the nice black dyed soft leather wrap for two silver pennies. That’s a bargain, that is. But here I am, just a sucker for a soft face as yours, lass.”

Well, two silver pennies is more than Gwen had been hoping on spending, but she knows that opening her mouth will only drive that price higher. She sighs and digs around in her purse, pulling out two full silver pennies while the tanner bundles the strips, dyed and plain, atop the full leathers and waits for Gwen to drop the pennies into his hand with the smallest – really, the _slightest_ – of winces.

“Have it sent to the smithy up on Mid Street – Thomas’s.”

The sun is pulling itself higher much more quickly than Gwen wants it to. Almost noon, and she still would like to find her way out of town to pick some flowers to freshen up the smithy. It’s been getting awful stuffy in there. Could do with a nice airing.

“ – Guinevere, Smith’s daughter, right over there,” a boy’s light voice says.

(Gwen stops herself from turning around from where she’s playing with a few trinkets made of polished wood – puzzles, brought from the East – but oh, she is curious.)

“Yeah, you’re right in luck, milord!”

(Is that Mattie, the boy who runs errands for her father?)

“Her pa’s Thomas Smith, runs the smithy a few streets up. And Gwen here’s even picked up the trade herself, can you believe it? A _girl_ behind a smithy?” And Mattie laughs, but too high spirited to mean cruelty. Gwen is well used to cruelty – not many think a woman skilled enough to work their blades. The world is a strange place, and Gwen can never quite fathom it.

“You know what, I rather think I can,” says another voice. A... familiar voice? But no, it’s been years since she’s lived in Camelot, and the Crown Prince would not leave the citadel long enough to reach Warligon.

“Well, after seein’ Gwen, so can I, milord. She’s got the eye for it, she has. Can see the line of the metal clear as day.”

(Gwen smiles, proud and overwhelmed just the slightest, because maybe at _last_ she’s found a place that thinks her worthy and not just strange and ill-mannered wild thing for not bending to the classic ideals of what a girl should be.)

“Do they barter?” asks the man who can’t be Prince Arthur. But who sounds so very like him, from what Gwen had once heard as part of the masses in the courtyard on announcement days. “Or even – will they give coin in trade for armour?”

“Not as a point of principle, but yours, milord, I reckon they might be tempted to. That’s fine, that is.”

Fine enough for Mattie to admire? Gwen turns around, ignoring the insistent pull of the vendors voice about, “Just three coppers, only three, and keep your little tykes quiet for hours. Peace and quiet, only three coppers, miss!”

Gwen’s eyes widen, though the sun slants bright across the market square, shining atop the dun wash of the market street. Gwen’s mouth slackens, because there he is, the Golden Prince of Camelot. His head bows under the weight of the sun and the sleep slathered thick beneath his eyes. His hands are bared and sore with skin cracked in the cold of what must have been too many nights asleep without a warming fire. Soft leather reins wrap around his left wrist and gather in his clenched fingers, but the horse at his shoulder doesn’t seem tempted to stray. It – he, a massive, dark brown stallion that bears nobility in the high arch of his neck and burden in the packs slung over his back – stands close to the prince, a firm weight at Arthur’s back.

People mill around him and Mattie, attentions fixed to the massive stallion, annoyed at every swish of his tail and scowling at his massive bulk in the middle of the market street that forces them to scuttle around in the gutters to sidestep. No one spares a glance for Arthur himself, perfectly unaware or uncaring that the blood of kings pulses amongst them. But the shine of his armour, dirtied and dulled with dried blood as it is, catches Gwen’s eye. She appraises it, up and down, trying to see the workmanship through the mud and flakes of blood that hide between the chain links and in the metal divots. Scorched along the tops of the shoulders, leather blackened and cracked – and, oh, but his poor back! Red slashes peek out from under the hauberk in angry glares, and how could she have missed this, the shine of skin made raw by wheeling burns?

Pendragon. Gwen’s father had used to tell her stories about the Pendragons. So many that when she reaches back through her mind, wading through the glut of warped and stilted images that sum together as the whole of her earliest memories, she sees her father again and again. Sees the dark stretch of his smiling face and the gleam of his teeth as he talks and talks and talks. The warmth of the heart spreads thick along her back and she wobbles always over her father’s knee. Sometimes Elyan is there, bouncing around the room with his voice distractingly discordant against the low lull of Father’s. Sometimes Mother is there, humming as she prods another log into the wood stove during the bitter cold of winter. But this is constant: Gwen and Father, and the stories he tells her.

His favourite had once been about the conquest for Camelot. How the man called Pendragon, king over the Otherkind – dragons and warlocks and the fey – had swarmed across a war-torn land and bent it into a kingdom. “The dragonlords hailed at Uther’s side and a thousand thousand men who wanted to fight for the peace they deserved, rallied to Uther’s banner. Remember, little Guinevere,” and she remembers even more easily than the story itself how he would wobble his leg back and forth and make her shriek as she fought to keep her seat, “that our king fought for us. So that we could have our home and smithy and so mummy could bake bread and so you could run around the street without silly militiamen frowning at you. So that’s why we bend our knee. To tell him thank you.”

Gwen had still been a young girl when everything had changed. Still a toddler clinging to her father’s calves, really, but it isn’t a thing she’s ever been able to forget. Prince Arthur’s birth, and how scared she had been when she looked outside and saw how red the streets shone in the sunlight. Sorcerers – hedgewitches, really – around every corner, and not enough swords to gut them all.

But that had been years ago. Ages, really, since it had been so bad. Once the king had his sorcerer track the sorcerers afar in the field, the city had quieted and it had become easier to bear the weight of the screaming that seemed ripped from the lungs of caught magic users and practitioners of the Old Religion alike as they were led to the chopping block. On days of public trial, though – when those deemed most dangerous were burnt in a show of perverse power – Gwen had never been able to pretend that her king was still the same man her father had once spoken of with such reverence.

Prince Arthur is staring at her. Gwen blushes and jerks her head away, hair bouncing about her face in her agitation. Heat washes up to the tips of her ears and she hopes it isn’t noticeable, the blushing. It usually is, though, and oh, he’s the _prince_ and here she is, staring and blushing and generally making him uncomfortable! So she turns back around to the vendor, who catches her eye and smiles hopefully while offering up a carved wooden puzzle set.

But then – oh, but he’s seen her staring already, so wouldn’t it be better to just turn back around and acknowledge that she knows that _he_ knows that she’s been looking at him?

Right. After all, he’s only a person. And he looks – Gwen turns around again, slow and on the spot – he looks tired. Like Lance after a long day of futile arguing in the city’s council chambers, or spent patrolling with the newer militiamen on their rounds. Like Elyan does when he stumbles home after weeks spent satisfying his wanderlust, carrying the smithy’s weapons along to whatever city might have need of steel.

Prince Arthur, standing with warmth at his back and an icy stillness locked in his face, looks like Father had after Mother had taken those three deep, chopped breaths, opened her eyes, and died at long last after so many months of fighting. Father had shown that same steel strength, too.

Gwen gathers her cloak tight about herself and walks forward with small steps, smiling at Mattie and trying to not let her gaze linger on the prince for either too long or too briefly.

“Father have you running clear across town again, Mattie?”

“No, Miss Gwen.” Mattie then opens his mouth, looks sideways at the prince, then closes it.

“Well then,” Gwen says. “Then you’d best go off and find yourself a bit of trouble, I should think. Not the – of course, not really though! And not that I think you would like to cause trouble. I just mean…” Gwen shakes her head, because this is silly, far too silly. “Go and find yourself some fun.”

“Yes, miss, a’course, miss!”

Before he’s finished darting off, Gwen turns to Prince Arthur. Her hands flutter at her sides. Does she bow? No, no, ladies must _curtsy_ , that’s the rule. But should she – maybe he’s travelling without pomp for a reason. So she could… shake his hand, that would do for any other chance meeting Gwen could find herself in. But as she raises her hand and reaches out towards Arthur, the horse leans its head over Arthur’s shoulder and huffs hard out its nose, eyes following her half-extended hand. She pulls it back.

“Um. Hi,” she says. “I’m Guinevere. I work at the smithy Mattie was talking about?” And there it is, her inflection shooting skyward. But, well. Gwen figures she can forgive herself for that. She _is_ talking to her first-ever royalty, after all.

Prince Arthur smiles, then, or at least tries to. Limp lips stretch out and his eyes open up a little bit more, though the hard set of his jaw doesn’t soften even slightly.

“I think you’d better take me there,” he says. His voice grates through the air like cinder dragged across a causeway, smoke-abused and lagging with exhaustion. “I’m sure you’d be interested in a closer look at this armour for bartering, after all.”

“Oh! Oh, yes, of course, we’d be overjoyed to have our hands on such fine metal work.” And oh, they would be – this close, Gwen could reach out her fingers and trace along the delicate patterns etched deep into the plate metal. Dragons and lions locked together in a swirl of ash-caked artistry. But – what had Father told her? Never let a seller know the value of his own work. “That is,” she rushes on, “we would not over-mind taking a look at your armour after it has had a good cleaning.”

Prince Arthur hacks out a laugh at that, something that bursts sharp and unexpected from deep in his chest. His teeth shine white against the dirtied dinge of his skin. “Oh, don’t try to fool me, my lady.” (Gwen flushes dark and deep and swift at that.) “I know the quality of the royal forge well enough. You shan’t be prying anything out of my fingers till I deem the payment fair.”

Gwen sighs. “Had to try, didn’t I?”

“Hmm. Come on, then. I’m in rather a hurry.”

And as they wound their way through the bustling marketplace, he doesn’t let more than a few strides pass without turning his gaze skyward, again and again, his hand tight around the grip of his sheathed sword.

\--

“Lance,” Gwen shouts as soon as the door to the house attached to the smithy opens. “Could you let Father know there’s someone here to see him?”

She wipes her hands on a mostly-clean apron that’s sat on a small side table and pulls her red cloak off to hang up by the door. The door still creaks when it opens, and really, she ought to have oiled it into silence by now. But then… on the one hand, a smithy without proper upkeep done on itself isn’t a reassurance to any customer, and on the other, with the door noisy as a cat on a spree of caterwauling, she can hear the door opening from anywhere in the front of the house. As it does just as soon as she’s put the heavy iron kettle over the fire to boil some well water.

“Found someplace to tie your horse, then?”

The prince – king, though, isn’t he? Gwen remembers now, the rider who had come through with a trumpet and a banner bearing the Pendragon sigil, announcing that the king is dead; long live the king – collapses into the chair by the door and starts pulling at the ties of his vambraces.

“The boy,” he says, not looking up at her and not answering. (And oh, but Gwen frowns, hands twitching at her sides, at that.) “He said you might have some idea on where to find a man called Gwaine. And don’t bother your father with this – he also made sure to tell me how your eye is fine enough to set a value to armour.” King Arthur throws his vambraces on the table beside Gwen and tugs at the buckles holding his gambeson loosely in place. The leather is fraying, burnt through to the core and crumbling even as Arthur gentles it through the metal fastenings.

“Here. Wait, stop!” Gwen rushes to his side and shoos his hands away. “Be gentle!” She tuts and tries to pull the armour off of him without further stressing it. “You mustn’t treat it so harsh after its been through so much. And here, I didn’t know there were any dragons left in all of Albion.” Gwen pulls and – oh. The leather cracks along a burnt line of stress. Ah, well. Would have snapped sooner or later. She pauses, then shrugs and starts pushing at Arthur’s arms until he lifts them enough that she can pull the gambeson the rest of the way off. His eyes drift away from hers and he stays quiet, barely flinching when she accidentally pulls his chainmail (“Sorry!”) against what looks to be a horrid burn peeking from between loosened bandages over his shoulders. “Though I suppose if anyone were to find the last dragon left, it would be a Pendragon. There!” The armour does look nice against the close wood grain of her table, burnt and sooty as it is.

“I’ll keep the vambraces and the gauntlets, but I don’t have time to wait for new straps to be fitted. Have you any armour ready-made? Something light. A reinforced jerkin would do.” He pauses, eyes flicking back and forth over thoughts Gwen wouldn’t dare guess at, before say, “And a strong tower shield, as thick as you have and large enough to fully cover a man.”

“Of course, of course,” Gwen murmurs, shuffling towards the back room. “Nothing to that quality, but – “

“That doesn’t matter,” Arthur interjects. “Give me your best and a purse large enough for a week’s worth of food and water for two – for three people, and that will do.”

Her father often tells her she’s something awful at striking a bargain, but Gwen thinks this king just might be worse. She keeps her lips pressed together and tries very hard not to blurt out anything along the lines of _But that’s not nearly enough!_

“That man I’m looking for. Gwaine. Have you an idea where I might find him?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anybody by that name,” Gwen says. She shakes her head and doesn’t try to hide the curious, confused frown that melts across her face. “But maybe Lancelot knows.” She turns in her chair and shouts, “Lance, could you come out for a moment?”

“But I was just off to fetch your father, Gwen.” His voice, soft with sleep still, murmurs its way through the hallway into the main house.

“We won’t need him anymore. Just come out here. Someone wants to ask you about a man you might know.”

The sound of Lance padding over the stone floors in his soft leather boots scuffles ahead of him, so Gwen is already smiling as he reaches the open doorway. Crinkles shiver down his face, which is slightly swollen from sleeping for hours with his cheek smashed against a hard pillow. He slept late, but he hadn’t returned home from his patrol until past Gwen’s second sleep, so she’s not surprised. Shame, though – Gwen’s come to love that time between first and second sleep spent with Lance. But it probably wouldn’t have been as fun as it normally is, with him so tired and all. Nor as athletic.

Blood flushes deep into her cheeks and oh, but that’s _King Arthur_ and she shouldn’t be thinking about such things around him because _what if he knows?_

Gwen stares at the floor, quietly fretting until Lance slots himself against her side. So she completely misses what happens before Arthur’s voice breaks out, harsh in surprise and – indignation?

“You!” he cries, shooting to his feet. Gwen flinches her head up to face him where he stands, before his chair, hand outstretched in a strange hybrid of a pointing finger and open palmed greeting.

Lance tilts his head, mouth slackening in disbelief. Gwen doesn’t really blame him for that, though. The King of Camelot, in their entry room!

“Prince... Prince Arthur?” Lance says.

“King, actually. Or haven’t the messengers arrived yet? But – no, you! The peasant who played at being a knight.”

“Oi!” Gwen shouts. “We’ll have none of that in this house. His heart’s just as noble as yours, if not more.”

Lance folds his hand into hers and squeezes. Arthur stops his huffing and sinks back into himself, eyes shuttering and fluttering, hands twitching at his sides. He shakes himself.

“Of course.” Arthur swallows, staring at the floor as he says, “My apologies.”

“I’m not a knight, for all that it might matter. But you – if you’re looking to find someone,” and here Lance turns to face Gwen, turning back only at her nod, “I can help you with that.”

“Gwaine. I’m looking for a man called Gwaine.”

\--

Warligon at night reeks of sour mead belched from the bellies of the drunk. The air tastes foul and the buildings lean in over Arthur’s head, dark and bloated, folding over the horizon and covering enough of the sky away that Arthur shivers and wishes for his tower views again. Wishes for Camelot, where the sky stretches clear beyond his window and the air springs through slits in the battlements fresh and crisp from the mountains. So many mornings he had once spent in the gentle air of spring atop the battlements, the blue of the sky speckled with puffs of white clouds; the grounds beyond the castle walls downed with grass that grew green with the flush of the morning dew.

“A few more, I should think, before we stop searching tonight,” Lancelot says. “But we’ll find him. No counting how often I’ve had to drag him from the taverns for starting up trouble.”

Arthur doesn’t groan – too many years of Uther’s heavy handed methods of dealing with ‘insubordination’ at the council table training silence into the roots of his throat – but he really does want to. Seven taverns already, and four of them doubling as whorehouses. Tonight, Arthur’s seen more skin than he used to see all winter, when the castle servants whiled away their extra free time by being… intimate… in so many of Arthur’s favourite hiding-from-Uther alcoves.

“Lead on, then,” Arthur says, imperious habit bending command into words that would probably serve Arthur better when phrased as a request. The man is giving Arthur a whole night of time Arthur knows he should be spending leading the militia on their search for a wanted killer. But then, Arthur is king, and _Kings don’t make requests,_ as Uther had once told him. He hadn’t understood, at the time – seven years and a child still, lonely and unfamiliar with the foreign ways of low-born common folk – how being raised to a kingship made him so different.

And though he learned quickly in an afternoon of supervised play that his word truly was more important than any other’s save the king – a toy sword claimed _Mine!_ swiftly plucked from Rhogir’s hand and gentled into Arthur’s confused grip – it hadn’t been until he, newly seventeen, spent an afternoon hiding from attending a dull council on the succession rites of a minor house at a point of strategic value in the south that Arthur had learned in truth how completely different he was from anyone and everyone else.

The afternoon had gentled the sun into an easy rest atop the canopy of lush leaves. Bread and wine and cheese and smoked meats were spread out across a rough woven tablecloth Arthur had had one of the scullery maids snatch from the linens and Emrys loomed close, an inescapable presence along his back. Warm and reassuring, though Arthur hadn’t known what he had needed the reassurance for. The smolder of Emrys’s magic curled against Arthur’s spine and, though he had tried to lounge with a goblet of wine in one hand and a small, loose-bound book in the other, he couldn’t concentrate; Emrys had been whispering to his horse, murmuring blessings in a tongue Arthur knew of, but couldn’t speak, the very words forbidden. The tongue of the Druids, sounding gentle and yet strangled all at the same time. But there was one word he had understood. The one that Emrys used at all times, sometimes at the start or sometimes the ending of the loose and sprawling phrases of foreign words: _Rhyddid._

Freedom.

And there, with his eyes caught sluggishly in the script scrawled across the thin leaves of the book Arthur had read and re-read on many a winter’s cold eve, Arthur understood the privilege bound in his blood, so different from the curse flowing through Emrys with every beat of his magic-born heart: both of them set apart from the rest of Camelot and for little more than an accident of birth. And for the first time, he wondered why his gut was telling him _it’s not fair_.

Lancelot pulls Arthur out and away with a gentle touch on his shoulder, a palm pushing between his shoulder blades. Arthur’s remembered footwork (Bedivere shouting “Shift your weight, and make it fluid, make it light! No, no, _shift!_ ”) pulls him along with Lancelot and through the tavern door. A wave of heat slams into him just over the threshold, muggy and thick with sweat. The common room of the alehouse pulls warm strands of the smell of stew over his face, and the press of heat from a hearth fire warms a scattering of heavy wooden tables. People pile over the benches, leaning together over the tables, laughing almost loud enough to smother the sweet sound of a singing lyre.

The room softens at Lancelot’s advance, shouts dulling and pointing arms retracted, though the light mood of happy camaraderie stays put. Not at all the reaction Arthur and the citadel’s guard had ever garnered – in the prince’s wake, eyes would sink to the floor as though weighted with lead and conversation would flicker, spasm, and die away. Smoldering until the moment Arthur had left the room, whereupon it would leap up again, born of regained freedom. And so it will always be, for a boy born with a king’s blood.

And though he knows exactly what his father would have said of Lancelot’s easy way through the crowd, it’s how Lancelot’s “Gwaine been through here yet, Percy?” pulls an answer so easily from the relaxed barkeep that has Arthur thinking that perhaps Lancelot’s soft ingratiation into the lives of the common folk might be a more worthwhile approach.

The barkeep nods towards the large hearth and says, “Been sat in that corner with a bowl of stew, a hunk of bread, and a flagon of pale mead. Just the one flagon in the three candlemarks he’s been sat there.”

Lancelot tilts his head up and his eyes down, eyebrows hitching in disbelief.

“I know, I know,” Percy says in answer to the question so obvious (to everyone but Arthur, standing solemn and very much not at all confused) that it hadn’t needed voicing. “Shocked me to silence, it did. Been gentling that one flagon down his throat this whole time. Not a dram more. Kept asking the scop to tell him a story of justice won.”

The man sitting on the hearth looks young, for all that a sickly pallor hitches down his cheeks under tracks of dried sweat. Fire-glow limns his profile and crackles through the dark blur of his eyes. He startles at Lancelot’s gentle pull on his shoulder, wobbles a bit like it’s a movement born of a habit of unsteadiness rather than an actual difficulty staying balanced.

Arthur sneers down at him. This man, this Gwaine, the son of a king and the incarnation of the ancient sword of Strength, if the Druids told it right. His fingers gather in Lancelot’s sleeve, tugging him to the side before either man can address the other.

“Are you sure this… this man is the only Gwaine living in town?” Arthur whispers, harsh and hissing between his teeth.

“Oi, my ears are working plenty fine!” the man rasps out, jerking the hand holding his ale out to point accusingly at Arthur, pale liquid spraying over the sides of the flagon with the force of it. “And who’re you, to ask for Gwaine?”

“A king, on the hunt for one of his citizens,” Arthur spits. “And here you are, in all your glory.”

A flush – permanently stitched to his skin, from the looks of it – burns its way down Gwaine’s cheeks. The ale splashed from his flagon spreads itself dark along the inseam of his trousers, curling around stains older and darker. Blood? Or the repeated stains of sweat from clothes worn from drunken stupor to drunken stupor, no time for washing in between? Sweat stains soak the underarms of his tunic and this is his fated brother in arms. Muscles twitch in Arthur’s cheeks and he lets his lips curl as his eyes sweep back up to Gwaine’s face.

“I had imagined that the strength to my courage would be of a more… noble bearing.”

Gwaine snarls, silent, and snaps, “Takes more than fine clothes and a gold hilted sword and the hypocritical crest of a dragon to make a noble, Arthur Pendragon. And even more than that to make a king.”

Arthur opens his mouth wide, angry and vicious with it, because _how dare he_ talk about Arthur like he’s seen everything that’s made him who he is? Like he knows how deep Uther’s lessons once scored into him, and how recently they’ve starting fading into half-remembered scars. Like he’s heard the whispers echoing in Arthur’s mind, soft and wistful and bright with the tang of lingering magic, that made him start thinking so long ago that maybe his father didn’t have the right way of anything at all.

But Lancelot speaks up first.

“Please, Gwaine.” Voice soft as his dark eyes, and even Arthur would be honoured to fight by this man’s side. (Why can’t he be the strength Arthur needs?) “This could be the calling you’ve been waiting for.”

Arthur breathes (eyes closed, nostrils flared, and there it hits him – the bitter bright of magic that clings to this unwashed drunkard, familiar in its sharp taste and almost warm as it resonates through his chest) and calms himself before saying, “Noble or not, I’m going to be tracking down a dangerous sorcerer, and it is your duty as a man of – “ Arthur breaks off, cannot help the sneer sliding across his face as he lets his eyes track from Gwaine’s boots, worn out and wet with horse piss from the gutters, up to his greasy hair – “honour.”

“I don’t owe any of my honour to any man who doesn’t deserve it. Didn’t give my brute of a father any, and I won’t give you any neither.” Gwaine snorts a laugh and pulls his legs up onto the hearth, locking his arms around his knees in an easy movement and leaning comfortably back against the wide stonework. The message could not be more clear. “Gods blessing on you in finding someone else to play your strength. I hear there’s a man wandering around the east end who has all the strength of on ox. Quiet, too. Not prone to voicing dissent, so you should like him just fine. Now leave me alone.”

“So that’s it? Going to go back to your drink and ignore your duty, to your king and to the people of Camelot?”

“To my king, yes, but mate, you’re not looking after your people, for all your fancy vows. I’ve seen a man – a sorcerer, one of them you like to behead unless they’ve been broken beyond free thought – more like a champion of the people than you not a week past. If he would have asked,” Gwaine mumbles into his mug, “I’d have gone in a moment. But no, had to fly off all dramatic like. Should have known someone named Merlin would be a show off.”

Arthur stops turning to go and says, “Wait, Merlin? Did he… did he _actually_ fly off? Tell me, what did he look like.” At Gwaine’s suspicious glare, Arthur tacks on, “The Crown is not above utilizing the skills of talented sorcerers.”

The wrong thing to say, apparently. Gwaine’s face becomes a fierce, bitter thing, eyes haunted with furrowed lines, but he can’t seem to stop himself from saying, “He looked as a champion ought. Not a pretty-boy like you at all, princess.”

(“It’s king,” Arthur says through gritted teeth. Gwaine ignores him.)

“Merlin had the skin of a fighter. Scarred hands – broken, once upon a time, and I wish I got that story. Or then, maybe I oughtn’t – and a scarred face to match. Knife fight, maybe, or a fist fight with someone wearing plated gauntlets.”

Or – what Arthur is almost sure actually gave Emrys those strange, hooking scars – a stay in the dungeons under careful watch of King Uther’s favoured interrogator. A blessing that Gwaine, for all his professed cynicism, has too much goodness in his heart to allow his mind to jump to that conclusion. (Crowns aren’t all that sons inherit from their fathers.) There might be a way for Arthur to persuade Gwaine to the cause, because if he’s so attached to Merlin, to _Emrys_ , and if he spent time with the Druids, then perhaps…

“I was told by one of my knights – Owain, your cousin, unless I’m mistaken – that the Druids have a special name for you. For Gwaine, son of King Lot, self-professed champion of the people who hasn’t done his fair share of championing these last few years. They still believe in you, though,” Arthur says over Gwaine’s wordless objections. “I spent some time talking with the Druids living in the Forest of Ascetir. They call you Strength, and they say that your time has come, Gwaine of Orkney. That in the stars your sign has risen. Ceridwen thought you would come willingly.”

“Ceridwen? With Aneirin and her little babe, Bran? Or I suppose he would be almost a man now.”

“She thought well of you. While she and the other councilmen were begging – demanding, really – that I seek out and stop the sorcerer, she insisted I find you. So certain you wouldn’t remain idle, in hiding, forever. I will be sad to disillusion her.”

Gwaine sits still a long moment, eyes roving over sights that for Arthur will remain unseen. The lute plays soft in the background, a gentle lull meant to play sleepy children to their beds. Arthur remembers the tune well – the last he was permitted to hear before being trundled off to bed by some nurse or other. But Gwaine doesn’t seem to find it all that tiring to listen to – he shakes his head twice before standing, face shadowed in relief of the yellow fire behind him, and saying,

“If the Druids need him found, then I – well, then I’m coming with you.”

\--

“No, Gwaine. The cape stays.”

“But – look, you tosser, it’s burnt and it’s falling to pieces and it can’t keep you all that warm, anymore.”

“It’s gone black around the edges, Gwaine.” Eyes forward, voice dry and uninflected. “But it’s still fur lined, and it’s still made of heavy wool. I think it’ll live through another few April nights.”

“And besides that, if we’re trying to capture an all-powerful warlock, don’t you think we could use a more… a stealthier approach? I love a brawl as much as the next bloke, but for some reason I don’t think brute strength is going to win us this match.”

“Oh, and I suppose _you_ know a thing or two about stealth, do you? I’ve heard stories about you from every tavern in Warligon. You don’t exactly pass undetected.”

“Oi, I may have made a scene or two in Warligon, but outside of the city walls, I’ve a leg up on you. Ran with the druids for long enough to learn a thing or two about walking sight-unseen. Not at all like you fancy Camelot ponces, with your bright red kill-me capes and shiny metal strapped everywhere you can persuade it to stay.”

“But regardless – don’t you see? That’s what we want. We want for him to find us.”

“And what, exactly, are you planning on doing when he does?” Gwaine smiles wide, threat glittering in his eyes. “I don’t mind long chances, princess, but I’d appreciate knowing your plan for me goes beyond ‘distract the all-powerful sorcerer.’”

“Have a little trust, Gwaine,” Arthur says. He flicks the reins of his horse in his hand and urges Hengroen on, under the arching of the trees that wave green hands against the sun. “My plan for you goes at least a bit beyond ‘distraction.’”

Arthur looks back, smiling because he has to; because if he doesn’t, the uncertainty and helplessness and _fear_ will flood across his whole face. _Not one man will follow a leader beset by fear,_ Uther had told him, once, on a day when the sun was bright and the training field filled with men Arthur was still learning to command. _So you never let them know you have ever felt any at all._

Arthur looks back, and smiles at how Gwaine frowns and shakes his head and grumbles and sighs.

\--

There’s a shiver wracking down his spine. The morning dawned crisp, still reeling from the bloom of misty rain and before-dawn dew left over from the night’s ending. Water chills its way through the thin leather of his calfskin boots. A shiver wracks his spine because Arthur is cold, having left his mug of fire-warmed wine – _Get the blood flowing,_ Leon had once told him – propped atop a conveniently flat hearth-rock at camp.

Birds sing through the air, and every so often there’s the cry of a hunting bird of prey, breaking the song-bird babble until the moment passes and the birds feel safe once more. (Though they are not.) The morning is quiet and wet and yellow green, the sun shining thin through the forest canopy, light spun into gentle halos that fuzz around the scrubby saplings and spring flowers that hug around strong rooted trees.

Arthur’s breath puffs before his face and he shivers against his will, an embarrassing, wracking shiver that shakes up and down his spine, almost breaking the hold he has on his scabbarded sword. It’s the cold, and it’s because he’s tired, and it’s because –

– _something is wrong,_ and he can’t ignore it this time. His skin tingles, but it isn’t familiar. Not like the dragon, and not like Emrys – that rush down the back of his throat and threading through the almost-silenced quarters at the back of his mind. But there is still the spark of unease riddling through him.

Empty waterskins bob against Arthur’s chest, but the stream is close enough to hear, gushing fast with spring melt and eager under the morning sun. The forest hushes around him, still lazy with lingering night, birds singing gentle into the breeze but not much else making any noise at all. No Gwaine to fill the silence, either – he’s busy packing up the camp from last night. So far as duties go, Arthur is fairly certain that his – filling the waterskins – is the more dignified, but not quite certain enough that he will allow himself a smile.

Arthur slings the string of waterskins onto a large rock by the stream. Moss edges into the grey bulk and shines in the sun, spray from the crashing stream sliming it into a slippery mess. The skins slide down off the rock and into the grass. He shrugs and then moves to uncap the first, but –

The birds and the ache of pressure behind his nose and vibrating along the edges of his teeth; that _something_ that squeezes the air from his throat in a tight hiss.

Sunshine beats onto Arthur’s head as he stands up and out of the low shade. Silence coats his ears, fuzzy and oppressive, the sound of water not loud enough to outweigh the absence of bird song.

And in the sky, a falcon shrieks.

The white light of the sun, clouds a loose threat still ringing the horizon, blots a shock of pain against his eyes. Arthur blinks, slow, but doesn’t turn away, because –

echoing through the air, hard with the teeth-hurting and pulse-pounding rush of magic

– there’s something magic up there, and it feels as sharp as the fury of a new wound with all the ache of scars that twisted deep into bone.

The silhouette, when the dark spots of the sun fade from Arthur’s sight, looks disarmingly small against the vastness of the open sky. It holds its wings stiff in an easy glide, circling, waiting. The breath of calm, the gathering of nerve and the readying of muscles, before a dive. It is only a raptor, small and swift. So small; perhaps as small as a merlin falcon.

There’s a shiver wracking its way down Arthur’s spine, that damned _shiver_ that shakes him as though he were a soft-faced squire, new to tournaments and the heady pulse of court. It’s an itch hidden in the bend of his neck that he cannot scratch away.

When it starts to burn him, scald his skin with unseen flame, Arthur turns, his gaze falling from the sky, and runs. This isn’t the plan, not at all – Gwaine is all he has that might stitch Emrys back into the fold of humanity, but alone Arthur can do aught but die at Emrys’s hand.

 _And no,_ he says to the derisive voice of Uther that lies trapped at the forefront of Arthur’s mind so constantly in these days since his passing, _that isn’t fatalistic. It’s pragmatic._ To know your own weakness; to accept the inevitability of your own loss.

The sun shines green through the tree leaves and the falcon cries above his head and Arthur runs, twisting around trees he should have seen sooner – the oddest kind of tunnel vision, that which follows on the feet of terror – and forcing his legs to press down harder on the soft sponge of moss; lift faster as he stretches out his stride; lift higher over rotting tree trunks.

Twigs snap and loose branches whip along in scratchy lines across his cheeks as he bursts from the treeline out into the open air of a large clearing between pockets of trees.

Arthur runs, fleet and feather-light ( _because if you think you are, you will be_ , says the Bedivere who lives now only in his mind) and rough-shod over tufts of hard grass. Cold blooms thin in his lungs and lances down his throat, but he runs as fast as he can, holding his sheathed sword tight in his arm to spare it from bouncing against his thighs. No more armour plating dragging him down, at least – he had thought he would miss it more, the pressing weight of steel against his chest, but this is more reassuring by far. In place of his plate hauberk, a worn leather jerkin skims along his chest and eases aside with each heaving breath he takes. Lighter, and it doesn’t gleam so brightly in the cheery sun of spring.

Not that it makes much difference, he thinks as he weaves between the trees. Falcons have eyes too keen by far.

Might be nothing, the falcon wheeling above him, drafting in circles over his head. Might be nothing, just a bird, maybe a bird blessed by the old gods, but –

Arthur grunts as his foot catches in a rabbit hole, throwing his arms wide to stay standing, fingers loosening over his sword _just enough_ that it goes flying out of his reach, golden pommel making a white arc in the sun. He stops, panting, throat aching and thirsty for water he doesn’t have. Arthur looks up and sees the falcon diving down straight at him and _knows_ , and his sword is too far away, and he runs, he runs so fast he can hardly breathe, chest tight and mind whirling with the damage he might be able to do with the dagger strapped inside his boot, and his skin pulls and tugs with every stride at the deep-running pain rooted in his dragon-hurt shoulder.

This isn’t the plan. Gwaine is still at their camp, and this isn’t the plan at all.

“Gwaine!” Arthur shouts, and the air feels thick around him, and how far is camp? Too far, or – “Gwaine, he’s here!”

His legs collapse under him, pain and bone-deep exhaustion from so many days spent running under threat of attack overpowering the buzzing energy that had been keeping him going. So King Arthur Pendragon lies in a field under the sun in the nascence of his reign, too far from the treeline for hope, and pants and thinks that as a boy, he had never imagined this ending.

He will not entertain the thought of it now.

Flat on his back, struggling to breathe – air gone, escaped, burned in the furnace of his lungs as he tries so hard to open up his chest against the pain scored so deeply into his torso – and afraid, Arthur points his boot knife (a bright blurring glint in front of Arthur’s eyes) wildly. It shakes in his hand, throwing spears of the sun across his face. He winces as light stabs briefly through his eye, grits his teeth and crawls to his knees, feeling the stretching damp of blood at his back weighing the bandaging down, skin ripped open against the ground, muscles shuddering and tearing as he pushes himself upright.

The bird dives, curving up just before he hits the ground. Emrys flaps his wings once, twice, and on the third, his wings fold into a black cloak that wraps around his human shoulders as he stands tall. Stands still and smiles, eyes dark with memory.

“Arthur Pendragon,” he says. (And how strange that his voice is nothing special at all.) “Last in the short line of usurper kings. And look, here you are, for all your years of training, crouched before me like a boy.”

“Emrys,” Arthur gasps. “Or is it Merlin, now?”

Cloud cover pulls shadow over Emrys’s face and rushes into the field of old, dead grass. The breeze picks up and flares cold, but Arthur burns with the power of the battle-born fire in his limbs.

“Where did you – “ Emrys cuts himself off. Shakes his head and forces an ugly expression onto his face where it sits, awkward over the cruel bent of his scarring.

(Horse hooves thud over the hard pack of dead grass and dirt.)

“Met someone who knows you,” Arthur says, loud and rushed and through the thick swallow he gives in to. “Or at least, someone who thinks he knows you.”

The scrape of tough leather and stiff cloth against the now-wet bandaging left by the druids hurts with a sharpness that has Arthur wincing, but there’s something like anger crawling across Emrys’s face, and Arthur can work with that. Arthur grew up learning what games were most fun to play at court; had gotten quite good at turning anger to enthusiastic coalescence when it served him.

“Had to act like it wasn’t you that we were after, to get Gwaine to follow me. He believes in you that much. Believes you aren’t a killer. That you wouldn’t bring so much death to Camelot’s doorstep.”

“Stop it,” Emrys says. “You’re a king, Pendragon, but you aren’t _my_ king.”

“No, because you killed your king – my father!”

“Because he deserved it.” There’s a bitter curve to the bend in his lips. “He has killed thousands for who they are. He would teach his land to do the same. He is poison, and all his line is corrupted.”

Wind bites at the heels of Emrys’s cloak and pull it almost level with the ground before slapping it flush against his legs; snapping wind hits Arthur hard where he balances on one knee and one planted foot. Arthur stumbles, starts forward, hands lurching out to brace himself, and there, the dagger still clutched in his fist, bright in the sun, bright and sharp and fast slicing between the winds and forward. Emrys flinches, arm barring across his face for a moment and then he grits his teeth, splays out one (twisted, bent and battered and broken) hand –

– it hits Arthur full in his chest, kicking into his ribs and throwing him back and beating the air from his lungs. (It’s like falling off his childhood pony for the first time, six and scared, trying to breathe like he’s forgotten how, chest clenched tight like the fists he made during play even though Nana had hated them so.) Arthur lands awkward on his thrown out elbow, the hard pack of the ground jarring him until he falls back, arm bent underneath the small of his back, dagger flat against leather of his jerkin. The sound of Arthur’s futile gasping for air – chest still clenched, still shuttered and spasming in the wake of that punch of magic – is quickly swallowed in the rush and crackle of static emanating from Emrys.

_Thud, thud, thud._

Horse hooves beating on the ground like a drum, the sound thick through the pack of dirt and faint in Arthur’s ear where it presses against the prickle and grit of winter-dead grass.

Gwaine.

Arthur’s eyes rove as he struggles to pull in long heaves of air. He lurches back up to his knees – shear of pain in his shuddering limbs – with the dagger clenched in his fist behind his back. The ground twirls dizzily with the sky and he can’t get his eyes to focus and his head feels as though it might split at the seams of his tender flesh like a carcass left to bloat in the sun – aching from the light, from the jagged pressure of a building bruise inside his skull, from the loud and fast and overwhelming press of _Emrys_ ; from magic poured into a vessel of blood and bone and bursting with power.

Black hair sharp as it flutters around a pale face, and Emrys isn’t trying to smile anymore. He looks – Arthur swallows, tongue clicking dry against the back of his throat and stinging – like he’s tired.

“You killed her, and you’re going to kill so many more,” Emrys says, soft and sure.

“Emrys – I didn’t… I wouldn’t…” Arthur’s head burns and spins and thoughts jumble so fast around him. (Leon showing him how to grip a hand-and-a-half sword, the pale eyes and dark stare of the boy Emrys upon his introduction to court; the smell of mint and lavender hushing over the Seer Witch as she swept through the halls; the bloom of blood in his father’s sightless eyes.) The dagger at his back, tight in his fist, leather wrapped hilt sliding against his palm – he inches it closer to his side and fights to fix Emrys in his sight.

“Oh,” Emrys says, eyes flicking down to where Arthur’s readying his dagger before he raises his arms, fingers spread, light crackling between them. “Be careful, Pendragon. I’d put that dagger down if I were you.”

Arthur closes his eyes, head hitching down just slightly, and sighs out a long breath. Drops the dagger straight down – it sticks fast in the ground, hilt in the air, but Emrys doesn’t seem concerned.

“Your campaign against magic is over, Arthur.” Emrys stands with the shine of the sun at his back, flaring around him with glory and brilliance. “It died as she died.”

And horse hooves thunder closer, ever closer, leaden in the air and heavy through the ephemeral light of mourning. The wind is quiet, and the birds have not yet taken up song again, and Emrys looks so old and sad and angry in a manner Arthur’s father never had been. Emrys looks angry, looks vicious and fierce, but it is tempered with a resignation that Arthur is unused to seeing on his face.

Suddenly, Arthur is tired too. Shoulders shake and shiver as he lets his arms fall loose; he collapses back to sit on his heels and he feels the weight of ash close in over him, flood through his veins and press thick on his tongue and fill his throat with cinder – all those he has seen die, and all those he has killed, and maybe Emrys is right about him. So many slaughtered at his hand, or under his orders, or because his voice had shrivelled in his throat when he had wanted nothing more than to speak up.

“I am sorry,” Arthur says. Emrys pauses, eyes flickering, eyebrows tightening before his mouth curls hard and thin. “I cannot right any of the wrongs done to you; to your people. But I am sorry for what my father – for what _I_ have done.” Breath slips too easily from his mouth – too like a gasp – so Arthur stops for a moment, settles himself, until he’s beaten control back into his greedy fist. “But she wanted – there was a knight, at her execution.” (A pulse of thick magic, wet and dewed with grief but strong with the pressure of anger swollen around it, slides across Arthur and slips beneath his skin until he’s drowning in it.) “She wanted to tell you – she wanted you to know… Her name was Morgana.”

Emrys falls into himself, eyes dropping to the ground, mouth shaping itself around her name. (“ _Morgana_.”) His fist tightens and Arthur –

– Arthur can’t breathe, but it happens almost gently. A swelling in his throat until the air whispers thin into his lungs; until the whispers fades into silence and he’s left with only the beating of his heart.

Arthur can’t breathe, noises smacking out from his mouth as it opens and closes and gapes, but this dying feels almost sweet, pain softened into the dull ache of absence by the swathe of magic spread through his lungs.

Did the Seer Witch – did Morgana feel like this, as she died? Arthur never had asked Leon, and Leon had never brought it up. But he thinks she would have died in agony, in the fire, choking and feeling the ooze of fat melt from her bones, because if she had had her magic still, surely she would have broken her chains and slain Arthur’s father where he stood. She hadn’t, though, so she must have died screaming.

She who saw so many things. (Dark red spots stain his eyesight, and he is tired, he is mired in almost sleepy remembrance.) Arthur wonders, sometimes, if she saw her own end. If she would have run from it if she had. If she knew that Emrys would become this thing greedy for blood and broken by memory. This thing that sees Arthur’s head begin to nod and tightens his fist, determination wrought through the sad pall of his face.

Blood beats thick in Arthur’s ears, and slows and slows, thudding, thudding, slowing and stopping, and –

“Merlin!”

Arthur chokes as the swell suffocating him pops, melts away, and air floods his lungs. He sucks it in, greedy for it, coughing and gasping and heaving heavy air through his loosened throat. Gwaine hops off of Hengroen, throws the shield hitherto strapped to his arm onto the ground, and kneels down beside Arthur, holding him up by his shoulders and jostling him until he no longer feels himself falling from the edge of consciousness.

“Gwaine?” Emrys says. Arthur – his eyes clearing, but the strain pulls pain tight against his skull – watches Emrys lower his arms and tilt his head, something small and vulnerable tucked into the shine of his eyes. “What are you doing here?”

Arthur shakes himself, stirring against the hold Gwaine has him in, but he still feels the rumble of Gwaine’s chest as he speaks and it feels like it had when Arthur had been a child, leaning back against his father’s chest on those rarer and rarer days he would prop Arthur up on his knee and hold him steady; hold him firm against tumbling off. Arthur feels he may still be air-starved.

“You know, I thought you had some grand calling when I met you,” Gwaine says. “That you had heard your calling, like the Druids always told me I would one day.”

Emrys swallows and his hands shake. “If you would…” Emrys’s voice hitches. “If you would protect a Pendragon, then you’re just as reprehensible as he.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Gwaine says, jesting but without spirit, heart pounding loud where Arthur clutches his wrist. Emrys holds his hands up, but reluctant this time. “Merlin! Merlin, stop this,” Gwaine shouts, no longer trying to hide the desperation in his voice. “Come on, I know you.”

“You know _nothing_ about me,” Emrys spits out.

“You’re wrong – I know a lot about you,” Gwaine says. “Because you talk in your sleep. Did you know that? I know more than you think I do, about the love you lost and the crusade you’re on, but I still thought that you were only after justice.”

“I _am_ ,” Emrys snaps, biting the words to pieces between his teeth.

“No, you’re not. Not anymore,” Arthur says through his aching throat. The blue of the sky gentles the harsh light of the sun as it shines fierce down against Emrys’s weather-worn skin. And flowing up from deep down, Arthur feels a foreign ache settle into his bones; feels ancient and sad and wistful. “Why are you doing this, Emrys? We used to talk; I once thought we could have been friends, were things different.”

“But here I’ve broken free of your father’s hold at last,” Emrys says, spreading his arms.

“And what of my hold?”

“You never held me like he had.”

“I know,” Arthur says. “And that’s the point.”

Arthur’s fingers band painfully slow and his grip on Gwaine’s forearm flutters in its weakness, but he gets his grip eventually; lurches upright, swaying under the silver sun and steadying himself before leaning into Hengroen’s warmth.

“I wouldn’t move any further, were I you,” Emrys says, stepping forward and raising his arms, but he sees Gwaine – now standing too, arms angled slightly out, set in front of Arthur like a shield – and hesitates.

“Not moving,” Arthur says, “just…” His hand digs deep into Hengroen’s saddlebag, hoping that it didn’t get lost; that he kept it safe enough to still be in here – and he finds it. The leather satchel tied together with a brittle necklace. “Gwaine,” Arthur says, quiet, and passes it to him. The bag is heavy and hard, lumpy with the jut of bones inside.

Emrys watches with wide eyes and stands, silent but for the snap of his cloak in the wind, as Gwaine hands the bag to him.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. Inside his chest, his heart runs faster faster _fast_ because this is it. This is all he has standing against him and the inhumanity that Uther planted under Emrys’s skin, where it festered and grew with its roots drinking for years from a well dark and sickly. “I’ve been – I have been afraid for most all my life of disappointing my people; my father. So I never said a word against him, and I never did more than turn my head as so many were slain before my eyes. I’ve been frozen all my life, but… I don’t want to be anymore.”

Heat prickles around the edges of his eyes, and that’s okay; that might even help. Arthur remembers countless raids and hunting parties, remembers how Emrys would shatter their defenses and stand aside, cold and distant from the warmth steaming up from the blood strewn ground, and that makes the tears come easily, flooding his eyes until he has to blink them into falling so he can see.

“And I couldn’t help the Witch; don’t think I would have, had I the chance. But I promise you that now that I am king, nothing like what you’ve gone through, what the Witch – what Morgana – went through, will ever happen again. I give you my word.”

Emrys stares at the bag and smiles viciously, but the hard lines of his face won’t set; he’s crumbling, muscles in his cheek shivering, eyebrows clenching at a desperate angle. With his cloak flapping out behind him and the shattering movement of his expression, Arthur thinks that he is falling to pieces; that soon little bits of him will swirl away into the wind like ash, like Morgana must have at her end.

The pendant does not sway along it’s chain – fire melted the links into a crisp curl, brittle, ready to shatter – as Emrys trails his finger along its rough edges. He almost turns his back to Arthur, perhaps shy of how his weakness is caught so firmly inside a lover’s necklace, but catches himself. His throat worries up and before before he finally speaks with a voice low and lowly.

“There was this place she would talk about, my lady – Morgana. I asked her a thousand times not to, but, well. She knew, I think, that the stupid, tiny, treasonous part of me loved it when she told me of it. Her other now. She went there often. As often as she could. And sometimes, in the night, when the dark crept close and we both felt we could reach out and live in our dreams, she would talk about what she saw. And so often it was about us, Arthur.”

Through the long pause that follows, Arthur struggles with whether or not he should talk; should break Emrys out of his memory. But Emrys continues before Arthur works through enough of the mire of his fatigue to say anything at all.

“You never spoke with her much, did you? King kept his pets close, after all. But she spoke of you. Like she knew you; like she loved you.”

Tension stretches the muscles in Arthur’s neck thin.

“Because she did,” Emrys says.

Gwaine starts easing to the side and Arthur breathes deeply, trying to suppress the war-drum thudding of his heart and steady the waver in his gaze.

“But I don’t think I can. Not anymore,” Emrys croaks.

“Arthur!” Gwaine yells, but Emrys sweeps his hand and knocks Gwaine back, pins him to the ground and though he struggles, fingers shredding through grass and digging lines of soft-with-rainwater dirt wherever he can reach.

Arthur sways where he stands, and his head is heavy; so heavy.

“What do I do?” Emrys asks, but Arthur doesn’t know of whom. “What did you want me to do?”

He stares blankly, eyes wandering, peeling off of Arthur’s face until they’re searching the sky. And then he stops. Stares. Leans forward, breath hissing out, neck tense.

Arthur turns and cranes his neck with stiff muscles to stare at the sky.

The darkening sky, pulsing with thudding waves of pressure and itching with wrongness.

“GWAINE, RUN,” Arthur bellows.

In the field, wide open and in exactly the spot the dragon is spearing towards, Gwaine panics, thrashing where he lies, eyes bulging, mouth wide open and teeth gnashing.

“Let him go!” Arthur shouts at Emrys, the habit of command almost overwhelmed by a stretched twist of pleading running through his voice, as he picks up the tower shield Gwaine had thrown aside and slaps at Hengroen’s flank, saying, “Go, go, run,” until he flees.

There’s a _snap_ that shears through the clearing, a pulse of repealed magic that leaves them all gasping like its their first breath after a deeply driven dive, before Gwaine lurches to his feet. His hand goes white at the knuckles where he grabs at his sword hilt and he runs, diving to the ground as far from the dragon as he can get before it lands, opens its massive maw, and roars.

Fire bursts heavy and loud from the dragon’s throat, raw and white and cracking the air with its heat. Arthur has the barest sliver of time before it hits him and he spends it staring over at Emrys, who had once – years ago – stepped between a blazing column of angry inferno and Arthur without pause and who now stands to the side, statue still but for the flap of his black cloak in the fire-wind. His eyes are wide and lit with fire-glow or magic – Arthur doesn’t know which, but he hopes that Emrys has enough good in him yet to stop another man from burning alive – and his gaze is fixed on the curling fingers of fire pealing from between Kilgharrah’s teeth. Pealing, spreading, pooling and twisting and _flowing_ so fast.

Arthur snaps his tower shield up (and why hadn’t he had any tower shields equipped before, in the clearing where his men were burnt to snapping brands of bone?) and kneels in one smooth motion. Heat hits the metal with a punch and spreads, fleet and fierce, clawing hooks into Arthur’s hands where they clench so tight at the leather strappings.

(Distantly, through the roar of the fire-that-flies, someone is screaming. They scream so loud it scrapes a bloody rash down Arthur’s throat and pinches through his ears, but the sound dims under the heavy weight of golden-green that spreads from the earth and fuzzy up through his legs. Cool and verdant, smooth against his bone and strong like the mountains spreading wide at Camelot’s borders, whispering against the grain of the heat and the _burning_ and the screaming that _you must have courage, Pendragon King._ )

 

Boiling inside his skin, under the quickly softening leather of his armour, the fabric underneath catching alight in the heat, slow and smoldering – the heavy weight of Albion presses up from the ground, but still his arms start shaking. Hurting and shaking and shattering apart, trembling in the screaming torrent of flame, metal buckles of his vambraces scoring deep into the flesh of his forearm, sinking and melting and _burning_ even through the cool wash of courage spreading from his bones.

Sound creaks through him in a rush, a half-remembered and barely-known voice shouting out, “Oi, feeling a little neglected here!”

From between the gasps of pain that ring through his ears and through the roar of heat, Arthur hears the sick slick slide of a blade scraping against scale and through the squelch of flesh –

– and then he collapses under the _booming-cracking-thunder_ that rips the air between its teeth, agony and pain and _not Arthur’s pain, not this time_. The dragon screams and the splash of dragon’s blood that reaches Arthur’s cheek is cold.

Shadows of the grass that once spread vibrant through the clearing crumble to shapeless ash when Arthur falls from his knees onto his back. His arms slide against his sides and shred his nerves to pieces, but the damp of the earth holds him in its palm and spreads sweet through his veins, smoothing the edges of the twitching-burning-flaring pain.

_Get up, need to get up, get up get UP._

But his legs won’t do aught but twitch and tremble and his arms collapse in shrieking pain when he tries to get them underneath himself. (Bedivere had died like this, flesh melted away and bones brittle like cinder, snapping under the weight of the world on his husk of a body.) The sky spins blue above him and an acrid stench billows in wing-born waves over his face. (The dragon, roaring – is he spinning back to face Arthur? Spinning back from wherever he had turned, moments before Arthur would have let his shield drop and swallowed the fire set against him?)

The brittle prick of burnt ground rubs at his cheek when his head lolls and lags to the side, and he’s tired and he’s weak, _I’m sorry for being so weak, Father._ But –

– bright sparks lance down his arms as someone pulls him upright.

“Come on, now, princess, he’s not fair happy with me right now – gouging out a fellow’s eye will do that – so we gotta move, let’s _go!_ ”

Arms hooking under his shoulders, hitching him higher, head swinging around and there, the dragon, the _dragon!_

Time snaps back into place in a rush of cold fear and helpless resolve. He pulls Gwaine down with him onto bended knee, reaching out to grab his shield back up, stuttering through the motions over Gwaine’s, “Bloody fucking gods,” scrabbling with fingers raw and blistered and cracked and bloody-black at the still hot to touch leather straps. “Fuck,” Gwaine breathes out before hugging one arm around Arthur’s chest and bracing Arthur’s back.

The dragon swings his head around and they together barely have the shield back in the air before fire cascades around them. The thick weld of metal begins its slow softening.

“You said you weren’t there, Merlin!” Gwaine shouts, and how his voice is brighter than the dragon fire, Arthur doesn’t dare guess at. (Blessing of the gods or wisp of idling magic, or both or neither.) “When you had your fever, when you were dreaming, you screamed for her, for your lady, and you asked me why you weren’t even fucking there when she died.” (The dragon roars in a brief respite, wings beating wind into them, but Gwaine holds steady behind him and together they hold tight against the barrage.) “I tried to light the hearth and you flinched _so fucking hard_ in your sleep that you woke yourself up. You weren’t there, and she died. But – “

(Arthur can’t feel his fingers, dares not look down at his arms, and he’s _tired_.)

“ – you’re fucking here now, and I _don’t want to die!_ ”

A strangled, “Morgana,” and a shearing scream splits the fire around them. Arthur tumbles down. Stirs on the ground where he lies, balm born of the earth twining up through the wreck of burnt skin and twitching muscle that he has become, and something golden and good wreathes around the secret stitchings of his heart.

_Father, it was never like this for you, was it?_

Green bough and blue sky and a multitude of singing breezes bolster Arthur, carry the weight of his damaged bones, and he feels brave like he hasn’t for years. Not since he cornered Emrys in the unlit room just off the kitchens, demanding an explanation for stolen scraps of bread and saying, “That’s okay, I won’t – Father won’t know from me,” when no explanation (and especially not the truth – that Emrys’s army of animal friends would only stay so long as certain food-related bribes were upkept) came.

Arthur had never told Uther about the little thief raiding the kitchens, and he thinks – he likes to think that that’s why Emrys never once told Uther about... About that one hazy, lazy day spent idling beside a stream, when Arthur had looked at the bow of Emrys’s lips and the keen sharp of his gaze and thought, “Maybe.”

The inclination would not have shocked his father, but it would have disappointed him all the same. Would have disgusted him even further, how Arthur had not pressed when Emrys had simply told him, “The Witch waits for me in her tower. Don’t tell me you don’t fear her retaliation for taking what is hers. I can see the pulse jump in your throat when she passes you in the hall.” How Arthur had not taken his right as Crown Prince. Had not made Emrys pay for refusing Arthur’s own idle (and deep and ferocious) wanting. But Emrys had never told Uther. Not ever.

Spring blooms along his calves and down his forearms; autumn scalds down his face, hard and withering.

_Father, you never knew this blessing because you would never have returned it, and the land will have her due._

A steamy haze hugs around Arthur as he rises. The light of the sun and the moon together in the sky with a rush of speckled stars burnishes the mist brighter and cleaner that the dragon’s blaze. His sword is in his hand, and of course it is. It has always been there, gold spilling over the fuller, baptized in the fire set against it and righteous in his grip.

The dragon’s – _Kilgharrah, our last first son_ , the whispers bubbling from the watery veins of the earth tell him – flame still wreathes around his teeth, but it no longer spills towards Arthur as it ought. As Arthur stands, he can see the confusion, the furious disbelief, pull Kilgharrah’s head down to face –

– Emrys, white as winter’s cold pall. His mouth gapes open, skin stretched about his face tight enough that his scars cast no relief, and he looks small. Like he had upon his first introduction to the court, a black shadow trailing at Uther’s heels, eyes incongruously shadowed for how wide they were opened. His arm stretches to the side, and he – the fire gathers at his palm, curling and taking form, a dragon of his own, and it’s – it rears back and grows. Kilgharrah pulls back desperately, one good eye rolling with the effort of breaking the hold Emrys has on him, but Emrys leans forward, throws both his arms out, hands curled into clutching claws, and he’s _pulling_ breath from Kilgharrah’s throat. It twists and ignites, fire streaming to the creature of raw, angry magic that takes swift shape at Emrys’s side.

It stands tall on hind legs, wings snapping and cracking and opening wider than the sky. White spears crown it and red anger holds tight to its breast. It opens its mouth and _roars_ , spitting out a gust of flame that twists into a hunting falcon. The falcon shrieks, pinions loud as they snap in a multitude against the wind, and clutches a sword gone ruby red with bleeding flame.

“I’ve seen that before.”

(And how is it that Emrys’s whisper can soak in through Arthur’s skin so simply, the sharp tang of magic loose in his mouth and tingling in his ears?)

“Omens in the fire...”

(Emrys, speaking soft as a summer pelt, and it almost feels like this was meant for Arthur alone.)

The fire-dragon snaps, the falcon screams, and between its claws the sword engenders sparks against the hard rush of wind. Black spreads in them, pooling at the heart of their flame, snarling, looking rotten in their assumed glory. The tang of the back of Arthur’s throat, the tingle-sharp-bitter-itch of magic he has only ever (and always) felt around this thing of magic that Uther stole from a swaddled crib and allowed to grow tumour-sick in the dark of Camelot’s dungeons, slides oil-slick down his throat and tastes _wrong_.

Kilgharrah recoils, still belching fire unwillingly from between his clenched teeth, and –

– _Our last first son,_ whispered against Arthur’s skin, sad and resigned, mourning already. Shadows cast by thick, roiling clouds spread a shivery chill through the air, even stronger than the inferno the glade has become. _Our conduit’s last living brother._

“STOP!”

The command echoes up and down the shaking spine of magic bending through the clearing. Emrys snaps around to look at him, and he looks so small against the dragon cowering behind him that Arthur forgets to feel afraid.

“Camelot has lost enough,” Arthur says, and something deep and dark and ancient threads through his voice. “Albion will have no more of it. Not by your hand, Emrys. Not your own kin.”

Gwaine stands loose beside him, but at Arthur’s nod, something seems to fall into place. His demeanour shifts, hardening, some loose hitch Gwaine had been carrying for so many years vanishing from his no longer listing stride as he moves to fall into Arthur’s side.

“The Tyrant has forced brother upon brother for too long,” Albion says. Arthur relaxes and feels the land speak through his willing mouth. “Only with our Strength will we put our child to his final rest.”

There’s a calmness to Gwaine’s movements that seems to gentle Emrys for a moment. His face slackens, grey with stress and lined with muffled horror. Remembering, maybe, the day he had heard of the Witch’s execution. (And still, Arthur wonders what his father had possibly been thinking that that had seemed a good idea.)

The dragon sways on its feet and lurches, though something – Albion or Emrys, Arthur doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know if there’s really any difference anymore – holds him steady and still. Kilgharrah waits, head lowered, neck curved in a grieving arch. Gwaine’s blade lies bloody on the ground with the blood from Kilgharrah’s eye before he picks it up with a soft swish.

“She broke my chains for you, Emrys,” Kilgharrah says. His voice doesn’t boom as Arthur (and Camelot and the gentle depth of Albion) thinks it ought, but races quietly, trying to outpace his own death. “Remember, young Warlock. Whatever I did with the freedom I gained, she broke my chains so that she might also break yours.”

The sun waves against the steel sword in Gwaine’s hand and sharpens his face into a brittle line of anger, and it doesn’t sit well on Gwaine at all.

Emrys tracks Gwaine as he strides across the clearing, scanning from Kilgharrah to the sword and then to Arthur of all things, before sucking in a breath and shaking out a long sigh.

“Remember your lost kin, Warlock. Remember those who would have remembered you, had the world wandered a different path.”

Gwaine’s arm is steady as he stands before Kilgharrah, the great dragon head almost touching the ground. A bow, Arthur thinks of a sudden. And it is. Kilgharrah’s foreleg is stretched forward, opposite hindleg stretching back, neck a long line from his shoulders down to the prickling grass.

His right eye is huge and wide and wet and his left gapes red.

“No,” Emrys says. His voice hitches and his face shines, errant tears shining along the scarred grooves on his face. “No, stop,” he moans.

Arthur says nothing. Gwaine’s jaw clenches and he shifts his sword in his hand until it’s angled in his hand like a spear, ready to be thrown.

“STOP!” Emrys screams, the sound thick with the rough of his throat, heavy and scraping. And something even – it is heavy with something even deeper than himself. He says, “You will leave this place, Kilgharrah, and you will never return,” and Arthur _jolts_ at the command.

 _Our last first son,_ Albion says, _and his Dragonlord._ If Arthur had not spent his years idling away at court during otherwise lovely summer afternoons, he would not have noticed the smugness in the voice speaking inside him, but he had and so he does.

Arthur smiles in giddy relief, laughs and laughs and hears Gwaine join in, as he watches the dragon take flight and _knows_ that he doesn't have to struggle to save Camelot anymore.

**6**

Each movement shocks pain across the worn spread of his skin and down through the roots of his muscles. Even his bones hurt, and Arthur swears he can hear them grating against each other every time he so much as turns his head.

When Gwaine had cut the leather jerkin from his body – metal buckles having melted into his skin and re-hardened in the wake of Kilgharrah’s departure – Arthur had strangled screams in his throat. Gwaine had been grimacing, wincing in sympathy as his fingers skated along mottled red and black skin, some of it crisp, some sore and oozing sickly blood. Distantly, Arthur had noted the chill burgeoning on the damp of his face where tears had streamed constantly.

“Come on now,” Gwaine had snapped, his head twisted around to glare wildly at Emrys where he had lurked. “You can help him. So do it.”

Riptides of pain had swept Arthur into a place of red and fear and inescapable fire, a swirl so violent that nausea had crawled into his throat dragging his belly behind it. (The sharp image of Gwaine saying, “No, no, no,” as he tilted Arthur’s head to the side so he wouldn’t drown in his own bile.)

“Please,” Arthur had moaned.

Emrys had swept up to Arthur’s side moth-quiet and had spoken with a voice of incongruous thunder, a hand hovering over Arthur’s forehead.

And Arthur’s skin had quieted; his muscles had ceased their screaming; his breathing had slowed into the steady rhythm of sleep. But he hadn’t slept.

He can’t sleep yet, with his thoughts so clamorous in his mind.

The sun is long in setting and all that time is spent in silence as Gwaine wraps Arthur’s remaining burns – some running deep, but none so deep as before, where in places the shine of bone glistened in Arthur’s own blood – and Emrys sits once again with his back to the pile of logs no one could stomach setting alight.

Arthur waits until the dark deniability of night to talk, Gwaine reduced to a gentle snore to his left and the moon on a slow rise, casting ghostly pale beams of dim light over the woods.

“I can feel you. Where you’ve been, what you’ve felt. Like a drumbeat rapping against my skin, I know exactly where your footsteps have taken you. You need to tell me…” (So many moments like this had come before, and in every one, Arthur had let his resolution wither; had let his voice curl around his tongue and sit there until he resigned himself to staying quiet just this once. But kings don’t fear to speak their minds.) “Is there a reason I’ve always been able to feel the draw of your presence? For so many years, the… the _knowing_ has been getting stronger. Is there… why?”

Emrys sighs. “I know what you’re thinking, and it isn’t anything half so special as that, Arthur. It’s just the call of blood to blood.”

Arthur lets the lull of speech droop thick in the air for a moment before asking, “Blood to blood?”

“Oh yes. Magic is your lifeblood as surely as it is mine. Or did my king never tell you? Well, regardless. Put your mind at rest, little king.” Emrys settles back against the hollow curl of the tree he’s curled up below, arm tucked beneath his head. Strangely childlike for the multifold age in his eyes. “It isn’t anything half so complex as love that binds us together. Just magic attracted to like magic. The Druids – ” Emrys yawns, jaw cracking loud enough for Arthur to hear, and Arthur feels a yawn of his own prise his jaws open. “– liked to talk about you, Arthur. Told me that you were Albion’s vessel, and I her conduit. It’s just her lifeblood trying to bind itself together. This isn’t anything so complex as love.”

“But I wasn’t scared of that,” Arthur says, confession teased out of him by the cover of a clouded night.

Emrys looks at him, and doesn’t turn away. Considering. Then he smiles, faint and wistful, the curve of his lips pulling at the fish hook scar stretching across his mouth. Arthur can’t stop himself from staring. Emrys has the skin of a warrior, worn with scarring, deep and shining pale in the moonlight; hands that have never held a sword bear so many nicks and mementoes of deeper injuries that Arthur would have mocked him for an overgrown novice had he not known the truth scraped across Camelot’s bloody dungeon walls. The truth about the darkness Uther forced Emrys into, festering at his edges until it found Emrys’s secret cracks, little weaknesses, and used them to slither inside and devour him like a festering wound gone untreated.

“What do you know of the Old Religion?” Emrys asks after a long moment filled with the skitter of tiny paws against the thick forest bracken and little else, his face still slanted away.

Arthur swallows and says, “Nothing more than what you once told me, years ago, on our way back from a Druid camp. My first, actually.”

Emrys smiles, Arthur thinks, though from where he sits all he can see is the bunching up atop Emrys’s cheekbones.

“Your father was very angry that I told you anything at all,” he says, not a drop of resentment hiding anywhere in his tone. “Oh, he kept me in the dungeons for ages after that.”

“But I didn’t – I didn’t tell him anything!” Arthur says, heart quickening. “I never told anyone.”

Emrys turns to look at him, finally. His eyes have a curious lilt to them, gentle and sad and pitying.

“I know, Arthur. I told him.”

“But – why would you...”

“Because how could I not? I told your father everything.”

Arthur shifts against the knotted roots he sits on. “Did he – is that how he found out about you and...” Heat blooms across Arthur’s face. He clears his throat, but suddenly finds that he can’t continue.

“Yes. Of course I told him. He knew everything.” An ugly scowl twists Emrys’s face, and he thunks his head noisily against the strong tree trunk behind his head.

“Then why would he have...” Arthur can’t find the words to say _why would my father have killed the Witch – Morgana – if he had known from you everything you felt?_

“I told him, Arthur, but that doesn’t mean he listened or believed. You heard him, didn’t you?” Emrys speaks with little inflection – a control born of a lifetime of training. “Talking about how droll it was that his two favourite pets thought to play at love. But then, there was really quite a lot he didn’t understand. I suppose that’s why he never cared whether I trusted my soul to the old gods – heathens, he would say – and I suppose that’s why he thought there no better methods of disheartening the Druids than to call me by their name for me.”

“He thought it was funny,” Arthur says. “Especially when he heard of how they still told your legend to each other as a solace. He thought it was so funny.”

“They talk about their legends still. The sign of the Trio has arisen, a small Druid boy told me.”

“Do you... Do you think that’s true, Emrys?” Arthur asks, pillow soft.

“Kind of hard not to, ‘less you’re too bound by the fears of your father, fears of the old ways, to actually look up at the stars,” Emrys says. He points his arm straight up and Arthur’s gaze follows from the tips of Emrys’s fingers through the gaps between buds on greening trees to the vast expanse of stars and blackness. The wash a swathe through the sky, a kingly sash tying the heavens, and... there. Three patterns – or is it only one? – linked just over the mountains on the horizon. _On the rise,_ Arthur thinks.

“Did she know?” Arthur asks. “About any of this, before she...”

“Hard to say. I would have once said that if she had known, I would have too, but it’s become quite clear she was more adept at keeping secrets from me than I had thought.”

Arthur stays quiet; picks at a scab of burnt skin between his knuckles. The oily smear of salve has already worked at softening it though, so all he gets for his efforts is a thick cake of salve under his nails.

“She got lost, sometimes,” Emrys says, quiet.

Arthur turns his head at a shivery rustle of noise and sees Emrys curling up still half turned away, sitting back against the tree and tucking his legs up to his chest; wrapping his arms around his knees and hooking his fingers together fretfully. A strange dichotomy of power and helplessness, Arthur thinks wistfully.

“Forgot which world she was in, closer to the end,” Emrys murmurs. “She started to let things slip. Little things, little stories about her other worlds that she wouldn’t tell me fully conscious and that I couldn’t see even in her mind if I looked. I thought she just forgot what she dreamed; couldn’t remember more than a hazy image, nothing worth sharing, but I don’t think that’s what happened.” The dark swallows Emrys’s words, covers them with susurrations of tree leaves almost louder than Emrys’s hesitant voice. “I think she was practising so that I wouldn’t know her plans for Kilgharrah.”

Arthur thinks about Morgana, how wrapped up she and Emrys were about the castle – not ostentatious, but obvious all the same. He thinks about her scheming to overthrow the kingdom Emrys served, and while he... almost... doesn’t blame her, he doesn’t understand her.

“She would do that?” Arthur asks. “Keep so many secrets?”

“You didn’t know her at all, did you, Pendragon?”

Arthur’s eyes trace the bramble that starts crawling around his legs with a strange pulsing (Emrys with eyes that glow like embers, but with a face in profile to Arthur, perhaps unaware the he is doing anything at all) and he thinks, _oh, but this is dangerous, careful, careful._

“I never had the chance to,” Arthur says, words gentle and slow and clear. “But in another world, I think I might have, Emrys.”

The gleam fades from Emrys’s eyes and he sighs back against the tree, a little lost but looking like he might not mind as much as Arthur would have.

“Don’t call me that,” Emrys says, almost as though he hadn’t meant to.

“Emrys?” Arthur frowns.

“It’s not... I don’t think it’s suitable anymore. Emrys... Emrys belonged everyone but himself. I can’t be him anymore.”

Arthur feels fresh warmth slide across his skin, soft as silk sheets (sent for at great expense on his request from Persia) decadently spread across his bed. He waits with a smile on his face.

“Let the Druids have their legends.” Merlin shifts where he sits, his face still his neck plagued by nervous fluttering. “I just... I want to be Merlin.

“Merlin,” Arthur says. “Well, that’s all right then.”

The air hangs in a stifle of silence around the clearing, and though Arthur doesn’t know quite what he could possibly say to perpetuate this almost-novel softness Em – Merlin – is wearing, anything is better than this nothing.

“Would you... Can you tell me some of those legends, then?” Arthur ventures. “They seem to belong to us, after all. ‘S only right I know more about them.”

Merlin smiles, small but dimpled, points to the central constellation in the pattern of three – the Sword – and says, “Goes a bit beyond just us, your Lordship, and don’t you forget.”

Tomorrow will be a struggle – Arthur feels he could sleep for years, but Camelot might well think themselves kingless by now and both Leon and Owain will be fighting the urge to mourn. They will have to make a steady pace back to the Druids, and from them to Camelot. Find a messenger to return to Camelot with news of their king’s health and the peoples’ safety... but Arthur will figure that all out tomorrow. For now, he lays back and stares at the stars.

Maybe this is what it looks like, those omens Arthur has been looking for since he was a boy – maybe this is who he has been waiting for: these two who lie, one silent and the other truly talking to Arthur at long last, beside him in friendship. Across from Arthur: a nobleman-turned-wretched drunk who ripped himself away from his vice to fight for a near-stranger’s justice with a steel-strong will that Arthur doesn’t know he can understand. And beside him, staring up at the sky with blinking eyes: a boy raised by the faith of the Old gods, by Druidic rite and in a time of their greatest trial, but twisted in the forge of a tyrant; a boy grown and tempered by love and withered by loss but rooted even deeper by something Arthur doesn’t understand.

Maybe this is the portent unlocking the secrets of Arthur’s future reign: in a company of allies, his father’s creature has been undone and reborn and talks softly into the night about the things he sees in the stars at last, so long after he had heard the Druids talk of them: the Dragon, Sword, and Falcon twining together, burnishing the sky with light brighter even than the pale curve of the moon. Brighter than Arthur’s ever seen.

**EPILOGUE**

_There’s a story passed around Camelot. Well, of course, there are many stories passed around – and slips of gossip and strands of rumour and folk tales grown to fantastical proportions – but only a few truly matter. The story – the true story, and that’s important – of the Witch of Camelot and her sorcerer is one such tale._

_The story passes along quietly, too soft to disturb the ghosts that still drift along Camelot’s burnt halls._

_“She walked these halls once, you know,” a seamstress, fingers calloused and gnarled with premature age, tells a girl newly arrived. “You were yet too young to bleed like a proper woman, weren’t you? But I bet you heard tell of her – the Witch of Camelot.”_

_The girl nods and cautiously looks around before leaning in to hear more. There is always more, listening to Mary._

_“No, no, look to your stitching, girl!” Mary leans over and slaps at the girl’s hands where they hold sloppy needlework. “That whole row’s gotta come out.”_

_Chastened, the girl bends her neck and starts pulling out the stitches where they sprawl large and messy. These are a knight’s hunting trousers, and everyone knows how brave and strong the knights of Camelot are. They deserve strong patches and clean lines in their clothing, at the very least._

_“Now – what was I saying?”_

_“The Witch!” the girl prompts._

_“Right. Well, time was, she walked these halls like a ghost. Magic, she was, and magic bent around her in a way the world’s never seen, before nor since.”_

_“But Merlin – “_

_“Not even for him. The Witch could walk in every world that ever could be, in the past and present and even through the future. The Tyrant King kept her close, trained her up from a girl, but he hadn’t got his hands on her till she was fixed as good right down to her bones. He never did own her, not like he did his sorcerer.”_

_“You mean Merlin?”_

_“A’course, girl, who do you think burned the Great Hall so black? Why do you think that happened? The Tyrant hurt our Merlin, and he hurt him deep.”_

_The girl shook her head and twisted her mouth down into a frown, born half of sympathy and half of frustration – needlework never had come easy to her, to her mother’s despair, gods rest her soul._

_“The Tyrant Uther Pendragon stole Merlin from his cradle and raised him to fear and love his king’s hand. He were alone, child, and best you remember afore you see fit to judge him, for loving the only thing to show him mercy for all the years of his childhood, even though it were the king who hurt him so bad in turn.”_

_“I would never,” the girl cries, face scared and fiercely earnest._

_“Best see that you don’t.”_

_“But if...” The girl trails off at the hard look the seamstress shoots her, spends a few moments in silence and stitching, then tries again. “If he hated it here so much, why did Merlin ever come back?”_

_“Because – and here’s what you should remember, girl – the heart will do what it must to heal. Not too long, you’ll find the same, or perhaps make some boy find that out instead.” (The girl blushes.) “Merlin wandered alone for a while, after he sent the dragon away, but there’s something stronger than history tying him to King Arthur and the First Knight Gwaine. And on the year he came back, well. You were there for the celebrations, weren’t you? When Merlin walked through the Great Hall and Sir Gwaine shook his head and ruffled Merlin’s hair, and when King Arthur smiled so wide and looked so golden as he stepped down the dais and hugged Merlin tight.”_

_“Way I saw it, was a bit more than a brotherly hug he gave him.”_

_The seamstress stops her stitching, mouth wide in shock, before letting out a great, “Ella!” and laughing deep and long._

_The girl, named Ella after her father’s long-dead sister, smiles and tries to keep her eyes demurely cast down to her needlework._

_“My father catches me ‘hugging’ a boy like that and there’s no way I last a week before I’m married off quick-like,” Ella says._

_It’s nice, she thinks, as she giggles with Mary about the King and his Warlock. Ella doesn’t know what Camelot was really like, before, but she’s heard stories. Even with them, it’s hard to imagine the kingdom so raw and angry and vicious as she’s told it once was. Easier to imagine, she thinks as she gathers the knight’s stitched clothing close and scurries off to set the bundle in his rooms, when she really looks around, though. The halls seem to close in about her as she follows the path to the Great Hall, where every wall remains scorched, though the years have likened the burn to the shine of rare obsidian stone._

_Ella had heard of the way it used to be just a few years past – smelling of stale fire and dead bones. Mary says that she likes to think that maybe it was love that brought Camelot’s brightness back, though in a ways different than it used to be. Strong and dark and wild, rather than the naive pale Camelot once had been._

_Mary says a lot of things like that. About how different Camelot is now than it once was. All Ella really cares about, though, is that her Threefold Kingdom – she heard a man in the courtyard call Camelot that, reverent as he spoke with the King, though his own clothes were at least as fine and his crown even a bit shinier – doesn’t look like crumbling anytime soon._

_Though – well, Sarah told her just the other day that all the fancy new lords rattling around Camelot these days were talking about armies and invasions and a Druid boy gone half insane while she was cleaning out the dishes from their opulent luncheon. Way Sarah tells it, King Arthur was calm when he stood up, Merlin steady and Sir Gwaine strong at his back, and told all those assembled that Albion united would outlast any army set against her._

_So maybe, Ella thinks with a grin, Camelot won’t shrink but instead grow a little larger. And that won’t be so bad. Not bad at all._  
\--.


End file.
